Sweden’s state-owned lottery and gambling monopoly Svenska Spel has posted a record number of applicants for the 2021 edition of its “Elite Sports Scholarship.”
The programme, which has been active for the past 40 years, was launched in collaboration with the Swedish Sports Confederation – Swedish Association for Sports.
Each year, the operator awards 50 amateur athletes with SEK 50,000 (€5000) in funding to pursue their individual sports. The reward is further supplemented with all recipients supported by the Swedish Sports Confederation of Athlete Resources.
Svenska Spel informed that they had received a total of 600 applications for 2021 sports scholarships, which surpass all previous years, where the programme had an average of 400 individual applicants.
“Svenska Spel is Swedish sports’ largest partner, from broad to elite, and we want to be able to offer the opportunity to combine both elite sports and studies,” Linn Rydstedt, Sponsorship Project Manager at Svenska Spel, said.
Svenska Spel explained that the admission into the scholarship programme had been driven by the company’s new group-developed brand development strategy, which focused on raising public awareness of the operator’s social tasks as Sweden’s gambling monopoly.