Sports federations compete in administrative contests to win the scarce grants still awarded by local authorities.

Fragments of f·r·iction

In 2050, no local authority or public territorial actor supports proactive policies to promote sports practice anymore. This situation arises from two parallel developments:

1. Ongoing economic austerity, resulting in the scarcity of grants. The continued reduction in resources allocated to public services, alongside their growing privatisation, has seen these resources redirected to other sectors deemed priorities.
2. Sports practice has become liberated: in addition to being individual, it is now deeply personal, prioritising a non-committal, unconstrained approach that suits each person’s preferences.

The intersection of these two structural changes has led many local sports federations to disappear, following a relentless logic of supply and demand. To support the remaining federations, a consortium of local authorities in the Pays de Retz has introduced a surprising public innovation: the Administrative Games.

A communal fund has been created, comprising the remnants of public subsidies combined with a “popular grant” funded through citizen-led crowdfunding. To win this mixed grant, several federations compete in the Administrative Games – a variation of the Olympic Games where the competition revolves not around sports but around proposal submissions and lobbying. Federations must demonstrate their ability to meet the needs of various interest groups, which form and dissolve opportunely, and must operate within an exaggerated logic where “the client is king”. Only the most deserving and high-performing federation will win the prize.

The Administrative Games take place over several months, during which each federation must accumulate as many points as possible across different criteria to justify their receipt of the grant for the next four years. The competition includes several events:

• The Sprint of Attractiveness, where within a limited time, the federation must gather the highest number of membership promises, fans, and followers, and maximise its online reputation index.
• Acrobatic Management, where the federation must balance the contortions of a well-managed budget, demonstrate harmony between “objectives and decisions” (with a bonus for avoiding backtracking), and perform mandatory feats of hyper-frugality.
• The Impact Pitch, where a representative faces off against others in an eloquence contest to highlight the knock-on benefits of the federation’s activities for the broader territory (economy, inclusion, tourism).
• The Inclusion of Non-Humans, where the federation showcases its efforts to integrate and consider the impact of their sports practices on other ecosystem actors: animals, plants, robots, or artificial intelligences. The promotion of interspecies mixed practices is highly valued by the jury.

Ultimately, this innovation combines a form of competition among federations – a kind of social Darwinism – and a meta-commentary on their inherently competitive nature.