Experts Define What Makes a Sports Club Manager Health-Promoting

Sports club managers now have a dedicated framework for embedding health promotion into the daily running of grassroots, voluntary and community-based sports clubs, following an iterative expert consensus study published in Archives of Public Health.

The study brought together 22 contributors: a five-member project team and 17 invited international experts in health promotion and sport. Over five two-hour expert meetings, the group engaged in an iterative cycle of reviewing, discussing and refining conceptual framework components. Three goals structured the process: defining what constitutes a health-promoting sports club manager, adapting the HPSC framework to the managerial level, and developing intervention components that support health-promoting management in practice.

The outcomes are concrete. The expert group refined the existing definition of the health-promoting sports club and produced a new definition of the health-promoting sports club manager, accompanied by seven guiding principles. The HPSC framework was then operationalised for managers through the five action areas of the Ottawa Charter, four progression stages, and an adapted logic model. In addition, 43 manager-relevant intervention components drawn from the source HPSC framework were transformed into practical implementation guidance that specifies actions at both the individual level and the board level of a club.

The authors position the contribution as both theoretical and practical. According to the study’s conclusions, the framework explicitly guides sports club managers in operationalising health promotion, and the findings are intended to give researchers, policymakers and club managers a clearer basis for integrating health promotion into sports club settings. The published version is an open-access article released on 22 October 2026, shared early as a citable, peer-reviewed accepted manuscript that remains subject to further edits before the final Version of Record.

For grassroots clubs, where paid professional structures are rare and management typically rests on volunteers, the distinction between knowing that health promotion matters and knowing how to implement it has been a persistent gap. By anchoring the new guidance in the Ottawa Charter’s five action areas and a staged progression model, the framework links an internationally recognised health promotion structure to the specific managerial decisions a club board and its officers make, from policy and environment to everyday practice.

Subject of Research: Developing a theoretical framework and intervention components to help sports club managers implement health promotion in grassroots sports clubs

Article Title: Operationalising the health-promoting sports club framework for sports club managers: an iterative expert consensus study

Article References: Ozbolt, P., Vuillemin, A., Johnson, S., Geidne, S., Ericson, H., Grieco, S., Larsen, M. N., Briggs, N., Eime, R., Wolfenden, L., Lefebvre, A., Seghers, J., Lane, A., Ooms, L., Meyer, C., Peroša, P., Algurén, B., Sevdalis, V., Timm, A., … Van Hoye, A. (2026). Operationalising the health-promoting sports club framework for sports club managers: an iterative expert consensus study. Archives of Public Health. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13690-026-02095-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s13690-026-02095-8

Keywords: health promotion, sports clubs, sports club managers, expert consensus, Ottawa Charter, HPSC framework, grassroots sport, intervention components, guiding principles, public health, Operationalising, health-promoting