What UK sports boards can learn from King V

In some UK sports bodies, governance discussion still assumes organisations exist to serve their members; Daniel Taylor argues that sport governance should be about stewardship, which has significance beyond membership.

There is a subtle but profound shift underway in corporate governance. It is no longer enough merely to tick boxes, accumulate independent directors, or spell out committees in charters. Increasingly, governance discourse is asking deeper questions: What is the purpose of governance itself? What is the board for and whom does it serve?

This shift is evident in the latest iteration of the King Codes on Corporate Governance. Published in October 2025, the King V Report refines and clarifies the philosophy introduced in King IV while embedding it more deeply in sustainable value creation, ethical leadership, and legitimacy. Although King V comes from the South African corporate context, its logic transcends borders and sectors, including into the world of UK sports governance.

King V rejects the idea that governance is primarily about compliance or managing contractual relationships. Instead, it emphasises the governing body’s role as steward of the organisation’s purpose, long-term value, and legitimacy – a shift that aligns closely with the insights of The Political Economy of the Company. That work teaches us that organisations are not merely bundles of contracts between members or stakeholders; they are social institutions embedded in broader communities, entrusted with authority and expected to create public value.

King V’s renewed framework gives practical expression to this understanding. It does not treat governance as a checklist to be completed; it treats it as a practice of responsible judgement aimed at realising outcomes that matter.

Governance as stewardship, not ownership

Perhaps the most important takeaway from King V is its reorientation of governance away from narrow notions of owner or member primacy toward a broader conception of value creation within a socio-ecological context. The code is built on outcomes that matter:

• ethical culture
• performance and sustainable value creation
• conformance and prudent control
• legitimacy.

These are not abstract ideals; they are the criteria against which governance quality is judged. The governing body is judged not by whether it has appointed sub-committees or written policies, but by whether its decisions translate into realised outcomes over time — in society, environment, and economy alike.

For UK sports bodies, this matters because much governance discussion still operates with an implicit assumption: the organisation exists to serve its members. That assumption makes sense if governance is about internal representation. But perhaps not so much when governance is about stewardship of a sport that has public significance beyond membership.

Consider King V’s opening principle: the governing body must lead ethically and effectively. This is not ornamental language. It bridges the internal and external, insisting that ethical leadership is the foundation of governance and that it must be exercised with reference to the organisation’s broader context.

Integrated thinking and the Six Capitals

King V carries forward a concept from earlier codes – integrated thinking – while embedding it more centrally in governance practice. Under this approach, the governing body is required to consider how strategy, performance, risk, and reporting interlink with the organisation’s resources and relationships.

For a sports governing body, this is a powerful corrective to narrow financial or competitive metrics. It invites boards to make sense of:

• how resources (people, infrastructure, finances) are used and sustained
• how relationships (clubs, communities, regulators, participants) are managed
• how the organisation’s activities affect wider systems in which it operates.

This is the practical side of stewardship. It insists governance is not a matter of internal optimisation alone, but of responsibility to the systems the organisation touches.

Stakeholders without confusion

One misunderstanding of King frameworks is that they demand boards include all stakeholders in internal governance forums. This is not the case. King V’s approach to stakeholders emphasises inclusion in thinking and reporting, not necessarily in decision-making structures.

This distinction is vital for sport. Stakeholders in a governing body’s ecosystem — players, volunteers, communities, funders, media, regulators — have legitimate interests. But they do not govern in the same way members or councils do.

King V encourages boards to understand and engage with stakeholders’ needs and expectations, to account for them in strategic decisions, and to be transparent about how they influence governance outcomes.

Inclusion of stakeholders does not mean delegation of governance authority. It means responsible attentiveness to the contexts within which the institution must sustain its legitimacy.

This resolves a persistent tension in sports governance between representative structures and effective stewardship. Councils and member bodies retain their roles as custodians of constitutional values; boards exercise judgement in the interests of the institution’s long-term viability. Both are needed, but each has distinct functions.

Board role: beyond compliance to judgement

King V deepens the ethical dimension of board responsibility by clarifying the characteristics expected of governing bodies: integrity, competence, responsibility, accountability, fairness, and transparency. These qualities are not boxes to tick. They are dispositions of judgement.

This is where King V resonates most clearly with The Political Economy of the Company. Both remind us that governance is a practice of judgement — a continuous exercise in reconciling internal purposes with external realities.

For UK sports boards, this means resisting two temptations:

1. Governance as neutral arbitration: treating boards as referees between competing constituencies.
2. Governance as technical compliance: treating codes as rules to be satisfied rather than as principles to be embodied.

Instead, King V invites boards to act as stewards in the truest sense: individuals entrusted with authority to guide the organisation toward sustainable, ethical outcomes while sustaining legitimacy among those whose trust makes that authority possible.

Legitimacy as an ongoing project

King V recognises that legitimacy is not a static credential; it is an ongoing project. Boards must demonstrate through action and disclosure not just what decisions they make, but why those decisions align with sustainable value creation and ethical culture.

This is not about theatre. It is about accountability with meaning. It aligns perfectly with the plurality implicit in political economy thinking: organisations are embedded in broader social systems, and boards must be accountable to those systems as much as to narrow constituencies.

Practical tool: the circular stewardship review

To bring King V to life in a UK sports context, one practical adaptation is what I call the circular stewardship review. Before major strategic decisions, boards ask:

1. Contextual value
   How will this decision affect the sport’s value creation across its ecosystem — including participation, reputation, and social trust?
2. Integrity check
   Does the decision align with ethical leadership principles and transparent judgement?
3. Stakeholder impact
   Who is significantly affected, and how have their legitimate interests been considered?
4. Long-term viability
   If this decision were viewed a decade from now, would it strengthen or weaken institutional legitimacy?
5. Disclosure narrative
   How will we explain our reasoning to those who grant us authority — members, councils, stakeholders, funders, and the wider public?

This is not compliance; it’s stewardship in the round.

A shared language for institution-level governance

King V offers more than guidance; it offers a shared language for governance grounded in outcomes, judgement, and legitimacy. It aligns with The Political Economy of the Company by treating organisations as institutions that must be sustained, not merely administered.

For UK sports bodies navigating tensions between representation and stewardship, internal voice and external responsibility, King V provides a way to articulate why boards and councils are structured as they are, and how they should behave in a world where legitimacy depends on more than internal consensus.

In the end, good governance is not a destination. It is a practice, a disciplined, reflective, and ethical practice of judgement that earns trust not just from members, but from the wider ecosystem for which the sport exists.