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Since the 1990s, the International Olympic Committee has offered nations more medal-winning opportunities at every Winter Games. Meanwhile, many countries are constrained by their limited financial resources to target sports strategically. The purpose of this paper is to examine the targeting approaches to Olympic Winter Sports of National Sports Agencies (NSAs), and to identify the factors they assess in the decision-making process.

The data were collected through semi-structured interviews with 11 decision makers of medal-winning NSAs at the 2014 Sochi Games. The data were then analysed with reference to strategic management in an approach which combines a resource-based view (RBV) with a market-based view (MBV) to build a competitive advantage.

The results show that NSAs, like firms, combine an internal analysis that reflects the RBV on resources and capabilities (e.g. athletes’ performance per sport and sport-specific elite sport system), with an external analysis of the competitive environment that reflects an MBV (e.g. sport’s medal market size and intensity of competition at Games) to target sports. Using this information, two phases were distinguished: first, the target sports are identified and finance is prioritised accordingly; second, the allocation of the nation’s resources is constantly reviewed in order to optimise it.

Even though social desirability bias in the responses could not be fully excluded, the findings can help policy-makers to distinguish between the internal and external factors identified in this study, and to make more strategic decisions by combining RBV and MBV approaches to build-up their nation’s competitive advantage.

This paper models the targeting strategies of NSAs during an Olympic cycle by introducing the competitive positioning of firms to sports management.

This paper aims to propose the concept of market potential analysis, which is commonly applied in economics, as a method to enable these investment decisions to be based on sound evidence.

The markets for Olympic awards, i.e. medals (top three places) and diplomas (i.e. top eight places) are compared in alpine skiing, biathlon, cross country, speed skating, freestyle skiing, short track and snowboarding from 1992 to 2018.

The most notable changes are identified in cross country (2002), biathlon (2006), freestyle skiing (2014), snowboarding (2006 and 2014) and speed skating (2018).

In spite of the evidence of nations investing strategically in their elite sport systems to produce Olympic success, there is a lack of knowledge on how national-level decision makers can use a strategy to analyse the competitive environment concerning sports contested in the Olympic Winter Games.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate coaches' views on developing leadership and shared leadership capacity in particular in competitive youth football.

This qualitative examination focusses on the leadership philosophy of ten male coaches at the sub-elite competitive level in youth football in The Netherlands and applies the theory of shared leadership to examine coaches' views on developing leadership capacity.

Only few coaches have a clear philosophy on the development of leadership in general and/or shared leadership in particular. Most coaches do not have a distinct view on how to involve players in the team processes. Shared leadership development in youth teams occurs occasionally but can be implemented more intentionally.

Although this study lacks generalizability, coaches' views are required in understanding how shared leadership is to be developed in youth sport.

For implementing shared leadership in football purposefully, a clear view on the development of youth is required, whereas coaches need to be taught, how to involve the individual players in team processes such as decision-making. In addition, leadership development in sport may have the potential of transfer of skills to other domains.

Learning shared leadership at a young age by athletes can have a positive influence on relationships in teams on micro-level and might have an impact on meso-level within a football club because of its social constructionist approach.

This study is one of the first to apply shared leadership at the micro-level of competitive youth football making use of football coaches' view.