Launched in 2022, the GAMES project reflected the shared understanding within the Olympic Movement that gender equality is a fundamental pillar of good governance, and is essential to ensuring fairness, diversity of perspective, as well as legitimate and representative decision-making in sport. In this context, the GAMES project was established in response to evidence that, despite positive trends, the systemic underrepresentation of women in leadership positions across society and notably in sport remained a persistent and inadequately addressed challenge.  

Beyond being a matter of fairness and fundamental rights, this underrepresentation has direct consequences for the quality of governance, the democratic legitimacy of sport organisations and the performance of the ecosystems in which female athletes compete. Yet despite growing awareness, the gap between institutional declarations and meaningful change on the ground has remained wide, with too many organisations lacking the frameworks or resources to translate commitment into action.  

It is precisely this gap that the GAMES project set out to bridge. Led by the EOC EU Office and co-funded by Erasmus+ Programme, the project ran from April 2022 to March 2024, with the aim to equip National Olympic Committees (NOCs) with the frameworks, knowledge and resources needed to meaningfully advance gender equality in their leadership and decision-making structures. 

To do so, the project worked directly with eight NOCs representing Belgium, Czechia, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Latvia, North Macedonia and Türkiye.  

Rather than applying a one-size-fits-all approach, the GAMES project began by assessing each organisation’s specific level of advancement and needs, before providing a structured pool of actionable measures and supporting each NOC in developing a national action plan tailored to its operational and socio-cultural context. This combination of diagnosis, shared toolbox and individualised planning proved central to the project’s effectiveness. 

This enabled tangible results with participating NOCs revising their governance statutes to embed measures enhancing female participation and supporting women in taking on leadership roles. Mentorship frameworks were also established to build pipelines of future female leaders within the Olympic movement. Beyond the directly participating organisations, the project contributed to concrete advancements in sport federations across Austria, Spain and Ireland. 

The impact and sustainability of the GAMES project extended beyond its direct participants. By developing a replicable model for governance innovation grounded in EU and Olympic values, the project has already inspired spin-off initiatives, including in the Western Balkans (e.g. Women4Sport) and in sport-specific contexts such as volleyball (e.g. EmpowHER, led by the European Volleyball Confederation). This demonstrates how the approach adopted and the tools developed through GAMES can be effectively adapted and implemented across diverse sporting contexts and governance structures, highlighting both the scalability of the model and its relevance well beyond the Olympic movement. The project also produced a set of forward-looking recommendations addressed to the European Union, Member States and sport stakeholders.  

Encouragingly, the years following GAMES have seen a notable acceleration in institutional commitment aligned with these recommendations. The European Commission’s new Gender Equality Strategy for 2026-2030 explicitly commits to closing the gender gap in sport and positions it as a tool to combat gender stereotypes, with action channelled through Erasmus+ Sport, the European Week of Sport and the forthcoming Strategic Vision for Sport in Europe. The ALL IN Plus project, launched in 2024 and co-funded by the EU and the Council of Europe, further promotes gender equality in sport. Within the Olympic movement, the EOC Strategic Agenda 2030 enshrines gender equality as a cross-cutting principle, and in 2025 the IOC made history by electing Kirsty Coventry as its first female President. 

Yet, it the added value of EU funding, notably the Erasmus+ Programme, should be also acknowledged as it enabled transnational cooperation, knowledge-sharing and the development of scalable solutions to advance gender equality in sport governance.  Indeed, by delivering concrete governance improvements across partners NOCs, inspiring comparable initiatives beyond its direct reach and anticipating the broader institutional momentum that followed, the GAMES project demonstrated that meaningful and replicable change in sport leadership is achievable, with its legacy lying not only in what it built, but in what it set in motion.