By Cheche Vidal
(Click here to go to the The Spanish version of the article)
Some claim that sports can be seen as a microcosm of each country’s society. However, in my book Fair Competition, I came to understand that, more than a miniature mirror, the organization of the system of sports competitions resembles the nervous system of a nation: It’s here you can perceive its vital pulse, its internal connections, and its capacity to generate movement and social cohesion.
In the case of Argentina, one only needs to look at football to underscore how sports both reflect the heartbeat of society and generate the social cohesion that sustains it. The Argentine Football Association (AFA), through its Federal Council, coordinates a network of more than 230 regional leagues and associations that organize multiple competitions by divisions and categories. The result is an ecosystem of thousands of competitions involving tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands of participants across the entire territory. This vast competitive fabric connects communities of all sizes, from the largest cities to the smallest towns, ensuring that sports are lived with intensity in every corner of the country.
What is remarkable is that this pyramidal logic is not limited to national borders. National competition systems are linked at the continental level through the work of regional confederations, which coordinate and strengthen the efforts of thousands of local clubs and leagues. In South America, CONMEBOL drives programs such as the Liga Evolución, which fosters grassroots and youth tournaments to consolidate a regional seedbed of talent. In Africa, CAF organizes the African Schools Football Championship, a tournament that connects schools and communities across the continent, offering millions of children the opportunity to compete in a structured and formative environment. In this way, football weaves a global network of competitions that, from local to international levels, ensures continuity, projection, and a sense of belonging in every corner of the planet.
This logic is not exclusive to football: practically all sports disciplines in the world are structured through similar systems of competitions linking the local with the national and the international. This network explains why, in economic terms, the development and recreational sector, sustained by these intricate competition systems, represents more than 80% of the global sports economy, compared to less than 20% generated by the professional sector. As documented by Chris Gratton and colleagues in The Global Economics of Sport, and as I develop in my book Fair Competition, this proportion often goes unnoticed, yet it reveals that the true economic and social strength of sports lies in its community-based, participatory foundation.
This federative system, structured as a true pyramidal network of global competitions, allows local clubs to feed into regional leagues, which in turn nourish national tournaments and ultimately connect with the professional elite. In this way, it becomes clear why, in the Argentine case, sports, and football in particular, transcends the condition of spectacle to also become a social and cultural infrastructure. It is precisely in the combination of an intricate system of competitions and the neighborhood clubs where the value and effectiveness of the Argentine formula are most clearly expressed: there passion is cultivated, communities are woven, and generations of players are formed, which explains not only why Argentina breathes football with such intensity, but also why it has consolidated itself as an inexhaustible producer of talents of excellence for the world.
We can imagine this system of competitions as a dense forest of fruit trees spreading across the country. The trees represent the organized structure of each competition, whose branches extend into categories that sustain the fruits that truly give meaning to that forest: the neighborhood clubs, schools, and other social organizations that, through competition, bring participants together and teach them the skills needed to compete. Each fruit thus reflects the value of a system that not only organizes, but also nourishes, enriches, and multiplies the sporting and community life of countries such as Argentina.
This reality in Argentina was recently described by political scientist María Migliore, who, in a television interview, highlighted the role of neighborhood clubs as central institutions of community life. A copy of the video, dubbed into English, accompanies this article, in which Migliore cites data from the Ministry of Tourism of Argentina, showing the magnitude of the phenomenon: the country has approximately 12,000 clubs, 80% of which are small (with fewer than 500 members).
Migliore also presented revealing data that underscore the cultural dimension of this phenomenon. She noted that nearly 5 million people actively participate in clubs, equivalent to about 10% of the country’s population. She also emphasized that 44% of those who engage in physical activity in Argentina do so within a club, confirming the central role of these institutions as spaces of socialization, belonging, and the transmission of discipline and values, while also generating positive health benefits that help reduce future costs for the state.
However, Migliore’s diagnosis starkly reveals the structural fragility of these clubs. Their survival depends largely on the “pay to play” formula, translated into family contributions and constant community efforts. This model, far from being a voluntary choice, becomes the only way for participants to maintain their sporting practice and for the institutions themselves to survive over time.
Migliore synthesized this economic vulnerability into three revealing facts:
More than 85% of small clubs charge minimal fees —in some cases as low as 10,000 pesos (barely $7.40 at today’s exchange rate)— amounts that are symbolic compared to real operating costs.
Even so, 70% of these institutions had to resort to parallel activities —such as raffles, fairs, and festivals — in 2024 to cover basic expenses, showing how much a subsistence economy has become the norm.
Approximately 20% still lack legal status, which limits not only their formal institutionalization but also their access to state support, agreements, and private funding sources.
These data depict a reality both powerful and vulnerable: neighborhood clubs embody community life and a sense of belonging, but they do so on fragile and uncertain economic foundations. And yet, even amid this fragility, they continue to emerge, endure, and renew themselves. That resilience comes from their bond with the engine that gave them origin and sustains them: sports competition, understood as the will to associate in order to, as I argue in Fair Competition, compete in the pursuit of excellence —not only individual excellence for each participant, but also collective excellence for the entire community.
Every weekend, competitions transform modest pitches into spaces of community, local pride, and social mobility. Without this web of competitions, many clubs would lose their very reason for being. This reality underscores the need to fully understand what sports competition means for modern society: not only as a virtuous system that fosters integration and social education, but also as a generator of economies of scale that, when managed with professionalism and vision, can guarantee the sustainability of social clubs.
Even more so today, with the advent of digital technologies and artificial intelligence, which not only make it possible to automate best practices in the management of competitions and clubs to achieve greater operational excellence, but also have the potential to energize their economy through digital sponsorship and multiply the benefits of sport for society —as long as they are implemented ethically and responsibly.
This is where, together with programs that strengthen the training of officials and administrators in understanding competition as a virtuous system for society, and that at the same time ensure the comprehensive education of participants in sport, digital innovation emerges as a decisive tool. The implementation of modern platforms would enable the automation and digitization of competitions, aligning with the best management practices of the digital era. This would ease the administrative burden that currently falls on volunteer leaders who manage “by hand,” while ensuring transparency and professionalization of processes. Moreover, it would open the door to a fair digital sponsorship system: a transparent marketplace connecting clubs and leagues with local and national brands, distributing resources proportionally, and mitigating the negative effects of the “pay to play” model.
In this context, the arrival of artificial intelligence represents an even greater challenge: it is not enough to incorporate it; it is essential to know how to apply it with judgment and ethics. As I argue in Fair Competition, AI and digitalization are part of a new industrial revolution that will transform the way we organize, manage, and live sports. Well implemented, they can automate best practices, broaden access, and enhance each participant’s experience; but they can also open new sources of economic sustainability for clubs and social organizations, whether through fairer digital sponsorship mechanisms or through the possibility of participants themselves monetizing their image and data responsibly. Used without vision or responsibility, however, they risk distorting the values of competition and weakening the formative and social role of these institutions.
As Migliore rightly points out, neighborhood clubs already exist, they are rooted, and they represent irreplaceable social capital. That is why, in countries like Argentina, where thousands or even millions of people participate in these institutions, digitizing competition and empowering them with responsibly applied artificial intelligence means making visible and strengthening a social and sporting activity that beats at the heart of communities. It also means transforming that civic passion into tangible economic value through the boost of the digital economy, directly benefiting the clubs and organizations that sustain social life. It is not only about improving administrative efficiency, but also about transforming community effort into sustainable capital, capable of ensuring the future of these educational, integration, and human development spaces.