The voluntary based sports system is challenged by societal changes. Firstly the latest years have shown a transformation in the sport activity pattern, whereas still more are involved with sport in a self-organized or commercial form and secondly the state’s overall financial ability is reduced. As the voluntary based sport is heavily state funded, the non-governmental sports organizations representing the voluntary sports clubs e.g. in a political manner, feel they have to position the role of sport to legitimize their existence. In this quest the connection of sport and health plays a huge role. The way in which the role of sports for enhancing health has progressed from a passive and symbolic approach to one that is more explicit, ambitious and organized, is fairly new. In Denmark the Football Association has launched a concept called Football Fitness, which is a football based concept for health. The concept is designed by the FA and realized by local voluntary football Clubs. Overall the implementation process has been challenging. The aim of this paper is to explore the role of the interorganizational implementation behavior of the actors involved with the implementation of Football Fitness. The theoretical framework of the analysis is rooted in interorganizational policy implementation theory and the research is based on qualitative methods, including interviews and document analysis. The data has been coded and condensed with pre-existing codes directing the coding in a hermeneutic deductive way. The findings conclude that the implementation actors can be divided into three major actors, each representing an “implementation system” - the central system, the regional system and the local system, functioning with somewhat different routines and perspectives, goals and interests. Together with the form of cooperation between each system, the interorganizational implementation behavior of each system complicates the implementation of Football Fitness.
Key words: Football Fitness, Health, Sports clubs, Sports Organizations, Sport Policy