The Correlation Between Public Funding Of Sports Programmes And Sport Quality Of Athletes In Individual Sports In The Largest Cities In Croatia

The structure and organization of sports at the local level is certainly one of numerous factors that can affect development of sports to a greater or lesser degree. The aim of this research is to determine the correlation between financial investments of public funds of the largest Croatian cities and sports achievements of athletes in six individual Olympic sports, through: costs of using sports facilities, professional work of coaches, competition costs, development programmes for young athletes and the number of active athletes and sports quality of athletes classified into 3 quality categories. The research covered allocation of financial resources from 2016-2019 which were awarded to clubs of selected sports in each of the cities: Zagreb, Split, Rijeka and Osijek, and the number of active and quality athletes. The Spearman’s correlation coefficient was used to test the correlations between the observed variables, and the quasi-canonical correlation was used to test the correlation between the two sets of variables. The results show that there is a statistically significant correlation between the allocation of public funds especially for the professional work of coaches, competition of athletes and youth development programmes, with the active number of athletes and of all three levels of sports quality, especially category III. The correlation with sports facilities is very low.