After Santa Casa da Misericórdia de Lisboa (SCML) caused general panic in Portuguese sport by announcing a cut in sponsorship fees of about four million euros, today she assured that the revision of the sponsorship plan for sports federations, the Portuguese (COP) and the Portuguese Paralympic Committee (CPP), “don’t put the Olympic project for 2024 in doubt”. Something everyone fears is about to happen.
In addition to the COP and CPP, Santa Casa has provided financial support to the Portuguese Sports Federation and the equestrian, motorcycle, handball, athletics, canoe, cycling, football, gymnastics, judo, swimming, skating , rowing, rugby and surfing federations. , table tennis, triathlon, volleyball and sports for people with disabilities.
If handball is afraid to “challenge competitions from next year”, athletics regrets the reduction in “symbolic value” and volleyball said it is already suffering from the end of sponsorship of the women’s national team and the Portuguese Cup for Gentlemen. Judo (30,000 euros per year) and canoeing (between 60 and 70,000 euros) were the only federations that Portuguese lose numbers.
The entity has also sponsored the Tour of Portugal by bicycle, the Portuguese football cup, the basketball and handball championships and the four existing futsal leagues through Placard. And yet the World Bike Tour, next to his sponsor 111 national teams and 86 university teams.
The letter from the Olympic augur
The federations were surprised this week by a letter from the provider Ana Jorge who reported on the suspension of sponsorships due to the “financial constraints” that Santa Casa is going through, and therefore revises the more “balanced and judicious” partnership model, without excluding “a any future reassessment of this situation in case the assumptions change”.
Less than a year before the next Paris Olympics in 2024, the austerity hit like a bomb and even prompted the Secretary of State for Sports, João Paulo Correia, to request an urgent meeting with Ana Jorge, as the cuts ” greater effects” as a result of the adjustment to the OJ.
For example, in Tokyo 2020, of the 91 athletes representing Portugal, 24 were scholarship holders from Santa Casa, a program that reached 54 student-athletes and prevented many of them from dropping out of elite sports or dropping out of college. , in an investment of 910 thousand euros, according to the latest report and accounts of the entity.
The president of the Portuguese Olympic Committee said he understood that the new management “wants to reassess the support criteria for the different entities, given the situation of deep crisis discovered in the audits already carried out and due to the intervention of the public prosecutor’s office regarding to investments in Brazil”. Understand that José Manuel Constantino will not have it anymore if the cut is only in the sports sector, not even for the irrelevant value for the Treasury of Santa Casa.
With losses of more than 52 million euros reported in June (which contrasts with the profit of 37.5 million euros in the previous year), the entity led by Ana Jorge since May is subject to an external audit of the accounts , carried out by the Ministry of Labour, Solidarity and Social Security.
Source: DN
