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Local authorities around the world provide different forms and different amounts of direct and/or indirect assistance to professional sport teams, which in most cases are owned by private business entrepreneurs. Findings from various studies indicate that professional sports teams do not make a significant contribution to a city in terms of its economy, tourism or even image. The purpose of this paper is to explore and question, from a local public policy standpoint, the justification for financial assistance from the local authority to privately owned professional sports teams that provide a public service or a public good.

In order to shed light on the process, a two‐staged study was used: an examination of the financial subsidies of ten cities in Israel, focusing in particular on Herzliya, an affluent community north of Tel Aviv. In the second stage, a representative sample of Herzliya's adult residents (18 years old and above) was surveyed with regard to the city's current policy on sports and the policy they would like to see enacted.

The findings show that both public officials and professional sports officials place subsidizing popular sports rather than professional sports higher on their priorities. The study concludes that the combination of a number of processes has brought about a democratic deficit.

Lack of transparency and the exclusion of the public in decision making processes has led to a democratic deficit in the local authorities. Once it was armed with empirical information and included in the decision making process, the public was able to reallocate the budget to meet its needs.

The purpose of this study is to characterise types of practices – or “routings” as they are denoted in this paper – that have been developed to incorporate non-financial inscriptions, representing value-in-kind (VIK) sponsorship resources, into accounting systems.

This study adopts field-based research, utilising Latour's (1999) concept of “circulating reference”, to illustrate how VIK (non-cash) resources were managed in an Australian sporting organization.

This paper contributes to our understanding of: first, how accounting infrastructure is constituted and stabilised by a network of multiple and overlapping accounting practices; second, how VIK resources are allocated and managed via local practices; and third, the importance of “budget relief” as a method of valuation in accounting practice.

Our paper has implications for understanding how financial and non-financial accounting inscriptions are related in practice, requiring both integration and separation within networks of multiple and overlapping routings of accounting practices.

Our work highlights previously unexplored accounting practices, which assist in the process of utilizing VIK resources in the context of a sporting organization.