DASH II – Sportshandling Risk

DASH II is Cinderpoint’s framework for sportshandling: the slow, often deniable reshaping of a sport once a powerful actor is already inside its structure.

Where DASH I looks at entry, DASH II looks at what happens after the door has been opened. It is about drift, not shock.

What DASH II focuses on

• Governance dependence. In practice, who can block or force decisions, regardless of what the statutes say.
• Competition structure. How formats, qualification routes, promotion/relegation, and access rules are adjusted to serve particular interests.
• Commercial and data leverage. Who controls platforms, data rights, and financial flows that the sport cannot easily replace.
• Rights and remedies. What meaningful recourse clubs, players, and supporters have when decisions are clearly against the long-term health of the sport.

When DASH II is worth running

• When a league or federation has lived with a controversial owner, sponsor, or host for long enough that “normal” has shifted.
• After scandals that reveal deeper structural problems but are treated as isolated incidents.
• During governance reform processes where there is a risk that only cosmetic changes will be made.
• By supporters’ organisations or player groups that need to explain, concretely, how a sport has been bent out of shape.

What decision-makers gain

• A grounded sense of how far capture has progressed and what is still realistically defensible.
• Identification of the few remaining leverage points that can still change outcomes.
• Paths for partial repair or containment, instead of all-or-nothing rhetoric that leads nowhere.

DASH II is not a promise of full reversal. It is a way to understand, and where possible slow or redirect, a drift that would otherwise continue quietly until it is too late to contest.