Governance Across Multi-Team and Multi-Club Structures
Why Rehabilitation Requires a Shared Operating Model
Abstract
As high-performance sporting organisations increasingly operate across multi-team and multi-club structures, the demands placed on rehabilitation governance have intensified. Athlete movement between first teams, academies, development squads, and satellite environments is now routine. Yet rehabilitation philosophy, process, and data governance often remain locally defined, shaped by individual environments rather than organisational design.
Elite rehabilitation outcomes depend not on uniform protocols, but on the presence of a shared operating model that provides philosophical alignment, structural consistency, and comparable decision frameworks across environments. Without this foundation, organisations introduce avoidable risk, reduce their capacity for learning, and weaken trust at scale.
The Changing Structure of High-Performance Sport
High-performance sport no longer functions within a single, contained environment. Modern organisations manage rehabilitation across multiple layers, including senior squads, academies, loan systems, partner clubs, and geographically distributed facilities.
Within these structures, athletes routinely transition:
Between age groups and competitive levels
Across medical and performance teams
Between domestic and international environments
These transitions are no longer exceptional. They are a defining feature of contemporary performance systems.
Despite this, rehabilitation governance has often failed to evolve at the same pace. While organisational structures have scaled, the systems that underpin rehabilitation decision-making frequently have not.
The Hidden Governance Gap in Rehabilitation
In many organisations, rehabilitation quality is assumed to be safeguarded primarily through practitioner expertise. Clinical competence and professional judgement are essential, but they do not, on their own, ensure alignment across environments.
When governance is implicit rather than designed:
Rehabilitation philosophies diverge
Progression criteria are interpreted differently
Documentation standards vary
Decision rationale becomes difficult to trace
These differences may remain unnoticed while an athlete remains within a single setting. They become visible only when continuity is required — during transitions, reviews, or moments of accountability.
At that point, organisations often discover that rehabilitation has been managed as a series of locally coherent processes, rather than as a unified system.
Alignment Is Not Uniformity
A common concern surrounding rehabilitation governance is the perceived risk of over-standardisation. There is a fear that governance may reduce flexibility or constrain clinical judgement.
This concern reflects a misunderstanding of effective governance.
High-performing organisations do not aim to rehabilitate every athlete in the same way. Instead, they align around:
Shared definitions of progression
Agreed phase objectives
Common criteria for advancement
Consistent documentation of decisions
A first team and an academy should not deliver identical rehabilitation. However, they must operate from the same underlying model of what progress looks like, how readiness is assessed, and how risk is contextualised.
Governance provides structure. It does not prescribe method.
Athlete Movement as a System Stress Test
Multi-team structures act as a continual stress test of rehabilitation systems.
Each athlete transition raises fundamental questions:
What has been completed, and against which criteria?
On what basis were progression decisions made?
Which objectives were achieved, and which remain outstanding?
When answers rely on informal communication, retrospective explanation, or personal reassurance, confidence in the process diminishes. This erosion of trust is not a reflection of individual failure. It is a consequence of systems that cannot carry context forward.
A shared operating model ensures that rehabilitation information remains interpretable, regardless of where the athlete has been treated or who is currently responsible.
Governance as Visibility Rather Than Control
Rehabilitation governance is often misconstrued as oversight or control. In practice, its primary function is visibility.
Visibility enables:
Confidence in decisions made outside one’s immediate environment
Continuity of care across teams and locations
Reduced reliance on informal clarification
More efficient and objective review processes
When visibility is embedded within the system, autonomy is preserved. Practitioners retain discretion within a framework that others can understand and trust.
In this context, governance does not restrict expertise. It allows expertise to scale.
Consistency as a Precondition for Learning
One of the least discussed consequences of weak rehabilitation governance is the loss of organisational learning.
Without consistent structure:
Rehabilitation cases cannot be compared meaningfully
Reviews default to anecdote rather than analysis
Patterns remain obscured across seasons and squads
Organisations often express an intention to review rehabilitation outcomes. In practice, meaningful review requires comparable inputs. When rehabilitation processes differ fundamentally across teams, learning becomes fragmented and informal.
Consistency does not guarantee improvement. It creates the conditions in which improvement is possible.
Leadership Load and the Micromanagement Response
In the absence of clear systems, leaders compensate through proximity. Increased check-ins, frequent updates, and informal oversight become substitutes for structural clarity.
This behaviour is often labelled as micromanagement. In reality, it is a rational response to uncertainty.
Where governance is strong, leaders can step back without losing confidence in what is happening across the organisation. Where governance is weak, involvement increases by necessity rather than preference.
Reducing leadership burden requires better systems, not different leadership styles.
Establishing a Shared Rehabilitation Operating Model
A shared rehabilitation operating model provides a common framework through which rehabilitation is planned, progressed, and reviewed across environments.
Such a model defines:
The philosophical approach to rehabilitation
The structure of progression across phases
Expectations for documentation and review
A shared language for describing progress and risk
This approach does not eliminate professional judgement. It situates judgement within an agreed organisational structure, allowing decisions to be understood, reviewed, and trusted beyond the individual making them.
As a result, rehabilitation becomes transferable across environments, reviewable across time, and governable without constant presence.
Conclusion
As multi-team and multi-club structures become the norm rather than the exception, rehabilitation governance can no longer remain implicit or locally defined.
Elite organisations require systems that allow rehabilitation philosophy, decision rationale, and progression criteria to move with the athlete. A shared operating model provides this continuity without sacrificing flexibility or expertise.
Governance, in this sense, is not a constraint on performance. It is the foundation that allows performance systems to scale with confidence.
If rehabilitation changes every time an athlete changes environment, is it governed — or merely managed?
Clarity does not come from proximity. It comes from systems designed to scale.
