2020 is an unprecedented year in the world that will be remembered by the pandemic of COVID-19. At the beginning of 2020 the coronavirus started to spread from China to all over the world, including Europe. According to worldometer.info all countries in Europe have cases of COVID-19. Number of people with COVID-19 is still in incline (April 2020) and nobody knows how long it will last. Italy is one of the countries which was specially hit by coronavirus.
Current situation in Europe with COVID-19 is not favorable for sport clubs. All sport clubs are currently closed and calculating how to proceed when and if they open their doors again. There are more than 7,000 sport clubs only in Croatia which are closed and struggling to survive during this crisis. Every national government is focused on how to save the country’s economy from collapse. Situation is further aggravated in Zagreb, capital of Croatia, which was during March 2020 hit by two strong earthquakes with the magnitude of 5,5 by the Richter scale and 58 smaller earthquakes with the magnitude between 2,0 and 5,5 by the Richter scale, in 24 hours. That happened in the middle of a corona pandemic and people were terrified. The earthquake also damaged a lot of sports facilities in Zagreb.
Because of governments safety measures, sport clubs all over the Europe are closed since March 2020 and it is unknown when they will get the permit to open again. Considering the situation, in April 2020 thirty European sports and other NGOs – many of them national level – have agreed on a joint document entitled Position paper on the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on the sport sector. This document emphasises importance of sport in the EU economy, but it also explains how mobility restrictions and lockdown have struck the sport sector to the core, and grassroots sport has been affected the most.
In 24 months of the project duration, there will be three group of activities, as mentioned in the project concept. After the activities ends, we expect to deliver a collection of good practices on how to deal with crisis in sport clubs, five reports on mobility visits and a successfully organised final conference during the European Week of Sport. As an impact, we expect to improve the knowledge and know-how of staff, exchange good practices and strengthen international cooperation in the field of sport management and physical activity in early childhood. In the short term, we expect to find/design examples of good practices with know-how to battle newly formed situations and how local sport clubs can use the crisis to be even stronger and better than before. In the long-term, we expect to improve the overall quality of sport and exercise for children up to 10 years old. The project will target staff of project partners in the first place as we want to improve their know-how. Indirect target groups are children up to 10 years old who should benefit once the project team starts implementing good practices at local level.