Sports club

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Not to be confused with sports team.
A sport club in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, showing various paved and painted surfaces for futsal, handball, basketball and volleyball, with two swimming pools in the foreground.

A sports club or sporting club, sometimes an athletics club or sports society or sports association, is a group of people formed for the purpose of playing sports.

Sports clubs range from organisations whose members play together, unpaid, and may play other similar clubs on occasion, watched mostly by family and friends, to large commercial organisations with

spectators
. Clubs may be dedicated to a single sport or to several (multi-sport clubs).

The term "athletics club" is sometimes used for a general sports club, rather than one dedicated to athletics proper.

sports clubs.[1]

Organization

Larger sports clubs are characterized by having professional and amateur departments in various sports such as

athletes belonging to a sports club may compete in several different leagues, championships and tournaments wearing the same club colors and using the same club name, sharing also the same club fan base
, supporters and facilities.

Many professional sports clubs have an associate system where the affiliated supporters pay an annuity fee. In those cases, supporters become eligible to attend the club's home matches and exhibitions across the entire season, and have the right to practice almost every kind of sport at the club's facilities. Registered associate member fees, attendance receipts,

Società Sportiva Lazio S.p.A.
).

Some sports teams are owned and financed by a single non-sports

Samsung Group (Samsung Sports), and the teams owned by the Anschutz Entertainment Group
(AEG). They may compete in several different sports and leagues, being headquartered in some cases across several countries.

Membership

See also: List of sports clubs by membership

In the field of competitive club sports, an athlete will typically be registered to only one club for a given discipline and will compete for that club exclusively for the duration of a competition or season. Exceptions to this include player trades and transfers, athlete loan agreements and unattached trialists. Where an athlete competes in multiple disciplines, or where club membership has social or training aspects such as local athletic clubs, then athletes may register with multiple clubs.

Multiple membership is more common in the case of individual sports, such as the sport of athletics, where a distance runner may compete for a track and field team as well as a road running team, and also have further membership at a local sports club for training purposes. Some national sports bodies require an athlete to state a priority order of their club membership, outlining which club has the higher, or first, claim on the athlete's services.[3]

Sports clubs around the world

In many regions of the world like Europe, North Africa, West Asia, the Indian subcontinent or Central and South America, sports clubs with several sports departments (multisports clubs) or branches, including highly competitive professional teams, are very popular and have developed into some of the most powerful and representative sports institutions in those places. In general, student sports can be described as composed by multisports clubs, each one representing its educational institution and competing in several sport disciplines.

In the

collective bargaining agreements and contract laws generally do not allow a player on one sports team within a sports and entertainment company to automatically play for another team in the same company. On the other hand, American varsity teams are generally organized into a structure forming a true multi-sport club belonging to an educational institution, but varsity collegiate athletics are almost never referred to as clubs; "club sports" in American colleges and universities refer to sports that are not directly sponsored by the colleges but by student organizations (see National Club Football Association and American Collegiate Hockey Association for two leagues consisting entirely of college "club" teams in American football and ice hockey
, respectively).

In the

Manchester United Football Club and Lancashire County Cricket Club are based in Manchester
).

Many clubs internationally describe themselves as

Futebol Clube do Porto; Fußball-Club Bayern München; Futbol Club Barcelona). The equivalent abbreviation "SC" (for "Soccer Club") is occasionally used in North American English (for example, Nashville SC and Orlando City SC), but a general reluctance to decolonize the sport terminology means that most North American teams, somewhat ambiguously, as "football" in North American English refers to North American gridiron-style football still use "F.C." in their name instead (e.g. FC Dallas or Toronto FC
).

See also

References

  1. ^ "Ältester Sportverein der Welt wird 200 Jahre".
  2. ^ Red Bulls Archived 2010-11-10 at the Wayback Machine redbulls.com
  3. ^ Managing Athlete Registrations Archived 2019-06-03 at the Wayback Machine. England Athletics. Retrieved 2019-06-03.
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