Inside MAiSI - The University Course Trying to Save World Sport
For 11 years now, MAiSI has been the academic reference for sports ethics and integrity. The Sports and Crime Briefing finds out why it's still the only Masters of its kind.
It took five minutes to convince IOC President Thomas Bach to fund MAiSI. He called it a no-brainer.
The meeting happened in Lausanne in 2015, at the height of what Professor Mike McNamee describes as “the perfect storm”.
FIFAgate had just exposed systemic corruption at football’s highest levels, with dawn raids and mass arrests.
Russian state-sponsored doping was unravelling, exposing an industrial-scale system of chemically enhanced athletes.
Cycling was still reeling from Lance Armstrong’s confession.
The sporting world was in crisis, and it had perilously few professionals trained to fix it.
McNamee, then a full professor at Swansea University, had spent two decades building sports ethics as an academic field.
But there wasn’t an obvious career path. Undergraduates would be excited about sports ethics, a handful would pursue doctorates, but there was no middle ground. No pathway to convert interest into professional expertise. No engine to train the integrity officers that sport desperately needed.
McNamee had been thinking about this gap for years. Speaking to the Sports and Crime Briefing, he said he felt he had “one more move” in him—one shot at creating a master’s program that could bridge the chasm between theory and practice.
The timing felt right. UK Sport, which McNamee knew well, was becoming aware of ethical issues beyond just anti-doping: match-fixing, gender equity, safeguarding, abuse, athletes’ rights. The European Commission was receptive. The sector, however reluctantly, was beginning to accept it needed help.
McNamee assembled a consortium of European universities bringing together different experts in philosophy, applied ethics (Charles University; Czech Republic), sports management and governance (Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany), sports law (Pompeu Fabra University, Spain) and Olympic studies (University of Peloponnese, Greece), and took the idea to the IOC.
“It’s a no brainer,” Bach said. He promised financial support for Olympians to attend the program within minutes, telling McNamee he just needed to figure out which budget to pull from, ultimately settling on the IOC Solidarity Programme, the organization’s charitable foundation.
“Of course we’re going to support this,” Bach said. The IOC has since provided support for 1 or 2 Olympians to complete MAiSI every academic year.
Bach, freshly elected and navigating a governance reform agenda amid cascading scandals, no doubt recognised the political and institutional value of the proposal.
The IOC could be seen as helping to professionalise the response to these scandals.
