Executive Diploma in Sport Leadership
Why Sport Leadership?
This elite executive postgraduate course is designed to equip sports professionals and leaders with the skills to develop a successful vision and deliver for the long-term success of sports organisations via the prominent role of Sporting Director.
Contact our team at VSI to book your discovery call today, email info@vsiee.com.
Course Information
Attendance:
OnlineStart Dates:
TBCDuration:
TBC2-Day Geneva Summit:
16-17 April 20262-Day Manchester Summit:
14-15 May 2026What you’ll study
Programme Overview
Developed with UNITAR and UREKA, this programme provides a development route for those who intend to lead sport into its next era. It recognises that the world now facing senior sport executives is one in which the pace of innovation, the complexity of global regulation, and the demands of long-term value creation require a far deeper level of leadership capability than we have historically asked for.
If you intend to have influence on the future direction of sport, this programme provides a meaningful opportunity for you to become the type of leader the next decade will need rather than the type of leader the last decade produced.
Programme Content
Lead Where Sport Meets Strategy, Science, and Systems
This programme bridges vision with practical strategy – where AI works alongside human judgement, and leadership is tested in real-world impact.
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- Explore international diplomacy, law and governance.
- Work confidently with AI decision-making.
- Apply behavioural and scientific insights to team performance.
Our focus goes beyond knowledge. You’ll grow as a leader – someone who can navigate complexity, move across sectors and jurisdictions, and thrive amid uncertainty.
The value lies not just in the curriculum, but in the transformation: a shift in identity, capability, and perspective.
This programme sits at the intersection of academic, political, economic, and scientific forces shaping global sport. It’s designed for leaders ready to think systematically, act responsibly, and design for long-term impact.
International Summits
Networking
Guest Speaker sessions
Access to industry
The Collaboration
This collaboration unites the global legitimacy of the United Nations and UNITAR, the executive expertise of VSI, and the academic strength of UCFB. Together, we create a leadership environment where sport is developed as a global system – and where future leaders gain the capability, perspective, and responsibility to shape its direction.
Welcome to Geneva
The two-day Geneva Summit places participants at the heart of the global system that shapes modern sport. Geneva is where the political, legal and diplomatic dimensions of international sport coverage – making it the ideal setting to learn how to lead responsibly at scale.
Over the two days, participants will:
- Build fluency in international law and diplomacy
- Examine how major sporting events drive legacy and national development
- Gain direct exposure to one of the world’s leading sport institutions
This immersive experience expands perspective, sharpens judgement, and grounds leadership growth in the real geopolitical forces behind global sport.
Summit Dates: 16th and 17th April, 2026
This session introduces the legal and political frameworks that govern global sport and shape the boundaries within which leaders must operate.
Participants will develop the awareness and literacy to navigate complex multi-jurisdictional environments, and understand how strategic diplomacy and legal fluency underpin safe, credible and influential leadership in international sport.
This module examines how global sporting events impact nations, communities and system development far beyond the event itself. The focus is on legacy as a strategic design discipline rather than a marketing narrative.
Participants will explore how mega events can become platform interventions for sustainable growth, political cooperation, economic regeneration and global progress.
This session gives participants direct exposure inside one of the leading institutions of world sport. The purpose is to situate learning inside real context rather than abstraction.
Being physically inside this environment enables leaders to observe how influence operates, how decisions are shaped, and how governance manifests in practice, anchoring the entire programme within lived institutional reality.
Live Webinars
Session 1: Artificial Intelligence and the New Decision Frontier
This session explores how AI is already transforming the quality, speed and accuracy of strategic decision making in sport. Participants will examine current capability, emerging application and the implications for leadership judgement as AI becomes a permanent intelligence partner inside high performance environments.
Session 2: Building Human Advantage in an AI World
This session focuses on how leaders develop themselves and their organisations to remain competitively relevant in a world where AI will become ubiquitous. We will examine how capability, adaptability and intelligent adoption will separate those who thrive from those who are displaced by those who use AI better.
Session 3: Integrating AI and Human Systems for High Performance
This session explores how high performing organisations create environments where AI enhances human thinking rather than replaces it. Participants will work on how to design psychologically safe, collaborative cultures where specialists and generalists can align around shared purpose while using AI as a multiplier of human potential.
Welcome to Manchester
The two-day summit immerses participants in a live environment where the science and practice of building winning teams come to life. It moves beyond theory into the real craft of sustainable performance – how teams are built, aligned, developed, and enabled to win over time.
Summit Dates: 16th and 17th April, 2026
Across the two days we’ll cover:
Examine what makes winning teams structurally different at identity level. Work on the deeper patterns, characteristics and conditions that repeatedly show up in organisations and teams who win over time rather than once.
Focus on why teams who win sustainably do so together rather than through isolated brilliance. We will explore trust, shared purpose, clarity of role and the mechanics of collective interdependence as the foundation of durable advantage.
Study the elements that turn momentary performance into repeatable competitive capability and learn how to design systems that hold standards, enable adaptability and produce outcomes reliably.
See why marginal differences separate those who are competitive from those who consistently outperform. We will explore advantage creation, intelligent risk, behavioural discipline and strategic resilience as critical differentiators.
This module identifies the essential archetypal roles that elite teams require to function at both pace and depth. We explore how different cognitive, psychological and technical profiles must combine, complement and counterbalance to produce sustainable team intelligence.
Can you deliberately build a team from the inside out, rather than accumulate talent passively? Here we’ll explore how to recruit, shape, protect and align the profiles required to create a genuine championship culture.
Examine the process of developing talent so that it generates results. We will work on the progression journey, performance scaffolding, and the leadership behaviours required to help individuals move into capability they previously did not think possible.
Our final session focuses on the ongoing craft of keeping high performing teams alive, energised and evolving. We examine how standards are held, how identity is reinforced, and how to continuously fuel the conditions that enables high performance thrive.
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