Sports funding – The Potas Commission’s medal calculators

It is the bad word in German competitive sports that instinctively causes the presidents of associations from basketball to athletics to get nervous twitches: Potassium – the short form for potential analysis. Everything was supposed to get better with the Potas Commission, which was set up in 2017 and led by sports scientist Urs Granacher. With the help of a statistically sound evaluation of all leading associations and their athletes, the tax money that flows into top-class sport every year should be distributed more objectively and in a more success-oriented manner. Gone should be the days when the German Olympic Sports Confederation (DOSB) and the Federal Ministry of the Interior decide on sports funding in the backroom.

Actually, this should be in the interest of all associations, especially successful ones. Nevertheless, Ingo Weiss, the president of the recently extremely successful German Basketball Association (DBB), rumbled: “Potas is absolutely not good for German sport. This doesn’t need to be revised anymore, please just get rid of it.” The basketball official expressed his criticism to the German Press Agency just in time for the publication of the new Potas report for the summer sports associations last Monday, thereby renewing his expression of dissatisfaction from September 2023.

Weaknesses in the first report

The German basketball players had just become world champions for the first time. Although the first Potas report for summer sports from 2021 calculated that the DBB had the lowest potential for medals of all German associations. Already afterwards, DBB boss Weiss was sure that the potential analysis was nonsense. The fact that the DBB women also reached seventh place in their first Olympic participation this summer, the 3×3 basketball players sensationally won gold in Paris and the men narrowly missed out on a medal, leaves little room for conclusion other than that Potas Commission was significantly wrong in some of the calculated potentials.

In defense of the potential analysis, one must also say that a third of it is based on the successes achieved in previous years – and things were looking poor for the DBB for a long time before the men’s World Cup title. The one presented on Monday new potential analysis With a view to the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles, the reading is clearly different: the 3×3 basketball players are now in ninth place out of 99 disciplines examined, the basketball men in 15th place and the DBB women in 44th place. Dressage riders are at the top *, the men’s national hockey team and the kayakers. The German Athletics Association, which was considered to have the best chances of winning a medal in the last Potas report, is now only in the top 25 in the jumping and men’s all-around disciplines. At the bottom are the water polo, weightlifting and taekwondo departments.

Dressage at the top, Taekwondo at the bottom

The new ranking reflects the German results of the Summer Games in Paris, but is not intended to be a pure reward system for past successes. That’s why two more so-called “pillars” are examined in the potential analysis, which are much more difficult to grasp than listing who, in which sport, has achieved a good placement in recent years. The Potas Commission also once again assessed the squad potential within the individual disciplines and the association structures, for example in youth management. And here there has been a lot of adjustment compared to the first report from three years ago.

On the one hand, it was decided that the association structures should no longer be part of the potential analysis in the future. An online survey with 130 questions plus requested documents was too much bureaucratic effort for the associations. In addition, the current Potas report comes to the conclusion that all German top sports associations now work professionally at a similarly high level, so that it is becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate between the associations. When presenting the report in Berlin, the Interior Ministry assured that the association structures would continue to be controlled, just no longer by the Potas Commission.

Data-based analysis instead of sporting expertise

The assessment of squad potential has already changed fundamentally. In 2021, the analysis still relied on the expertise of the sporting management of the individual associations, who were supposed to assess for themselves whether there were medal candidates in their teams. However, this resulted in a certain imbalance between assessment and reality. That is why the cadre potential for the current report was replaced by a data-based process. To do this, the commission bought into the database of the Californian company Gracenote, which contains over 400,000 teams and athletes and the results of junior to elite competitions are entered daily.

Gracenote uses this to calculate a so-called Elo value, on which the world chess rankings and Fifa’s national rankings are based. Based on this value, Potas leader Granacher and his team calculated how the German athletes would have to develop compared to the world’s best in their respective sport in order to be able to compete for the medals in Los Angeles in 2028. To put it simply, the greater the gap to the world’s best, the less likely it is that a team or individual will make it into the top three in the world in the next four years, especially if the development has not recently shown a steep upward trend.

Problems in top-class sport lie deeper

Even with the help of the new data, it will not be possible to predict career paths and medal numbers, Granacher said when presenting the Potas report. A look at the DBB teams, which are so highly rated, shows how difficult it is to quantify future chances of success. For the 3×3 basketball players, Svenja Brunckhorst (career ended immediately after the Olympics) and Sonja Greinacher will definitely no longer be part of the team of four in Los Angeles due to their age. DBB captain Dennis Schröder will also be shortly before his 35th birthday at the 2028 games. Nobody can predict whether Franz Wagner in the DBB men and Elisa Mevius in the 3×3 women will continue their steep development by then – not even Potas.

But that was never the goal. From the outset, the potential analysis was primarily an instrument to provide more objective data for the Ministry of the Interior’s funding decisions. Just a year ago, the Federal Audit Office criticized the opaque allocation of the 300 million euros in tax money that went to top German sports in 2023. If the Potas Commission ensures a little more transparency and objectivity here, it can hardly do any harm – and if it also shakes up a few long-established association presidents, all the better.

Even funding that is perfectly tailored to the chances of success of the individual disciplines cannot solve all the problems of top-class German sport. These are deeper, for example when it comes to a lack of trainers, the compatibility of top-class sport and training, or the delayed merger of too many small performance centers. If the distribution of funding by the Potas Commission becomes at least a little easier in the future, the DOSB and the top sports associations can address other pressing problems more quickly so that German athletes can really use their full potential in Los Angeles in four years.