Digital Credentials in Sports: Wallets for Athletics

Athletics is the purest sport —already included in the ancient Olympics since 776 BCE—, one of the most popular and easy to practice, as the growth of recreational runners shows. Like most international competitive sports, athletics is highly regulated, with common rules worldwide and a hierarchical structure of federations that govern competitions and bridge grassroots development with the competitive activities. On top, World Athletics defines the common grounds that six Area Federations (European, African, Asian, South American, Oceania, and North/Central America), and their Member Federations —usually associated with the country level— apply and implement locally in the territories. These local federations may include particularities and extensions of these rules, e.g., specific event types, different tournament formats, and medical or qualification requirements. These basic competition standards set by the top governing bodies are essential for international competitions and for measuring and comparing performances globally.

Through their capillarity, local federations are responsible for engagement, registration, and management of all stakeholders involved, from athletes and their coaches and managers to competition officials and licensed clubs. This licensing model enables fair sport and ensures high standards for amateur and professional competitions. Although these federations apply similar concepts, identify persons in the same way, and use similar roles, in practice, they do so through distinct data models and taxonomies, as well as different systems and formats. These domestic solutions work, and federations have developed efficient digital systems for the stakeholders’ identification and licensing. However, when these locally licensed athletes participate in international competitions, interoperability breaks down, requiring manual supervision.

World Athletics has solved the problem of athlete identification with its identification system, which assigns elite athletes a unique identifier in the official database. This ID may be retrieved and reused by third parties (e.g., service providers, event organizers, and national federations) through dedicated APIs.  This centralized solution streamlines statisticians’ work, which has long been hampered by inconsistent naming conventions (e.g., changes in athletes’ surnames, misspelled names, and localized names across languages), enabling efficient collection and tracking of athletes’ results and achievements. However, this identification system neither includes complementary information on licensing nor affects the majority of competitors —non-elite athletes and numerous grassroots athletes.

Digital Identities, “the topic” at AthTech’25

European Athletics, well known for its commitment and advocacy in the digital transformation of sports, organized the sixth edition of its biannual AthTech conference, held in San Marino early last October. There, more than 130 delegates from national federations, service providers, and data experts gathered together to discuss the digital strategy for the future of Athletics in Europe and beyond. Of course, we discussed the impact of IA in sports and how to improve calendars and results, but the number one topic was Digital Identity and how to create a new international standard that is applicable and extensible to local needs worldwide, across any sport.

For hours, we discussed how to make the most of the EUDI (European Digital Identity) Wallet ecosystem’s foundational model and standards and how to apply it to Athletics and sports. The decentralized nature of the federations and the need for official credentials (i.e., licenses for athletes, coaches, managers, officials, clubs) and attestations (i.e., records, competitive qualifications, event participation permits, competitive category, rankings, medical certificates, and antidoping results) make sports as the ideal candidate for a new use case to build on top of the eIDAS 2.0 ecosystem. We foresaw that EUDI wallets for sports will disrupt sports management, bringing cross-border interoperability, boosting the performance of federations and service providers, and increasing the privacy, security, and user experience of athletes, coaches, officials, and fans. At the same time, we predicted that EUDI Wallets for Sports would create additional business opportunities and facilitate the onboarding of new athletes into regulated sports.

The EUDI Wallet ecosystem is being formally established to create a framework for secure digital identity and exchange of credentials across and beyond Europe. It is based on a decentralized model that enables flexibility and trust. In this model, the user holds their own verified credentials (such as diplomas, driver’s licenses, or proof of age) issued by trusted authorities (like governments or universities). The core principles are user control and flexibility; citizens decide which attributes of their identity to share, with whom, and for what purpose, leveraging advanced cryptographic techniques to ensure privacy and data minimization.

The official adoption of this new system, expected by the end of 2026, will cause a deep disruption in the daily lives of European citizens, streamline interactions with both public and private services, and increase business cases and productivity within and across institutions. Initially conceived for public services (official personal IDs) and sectors like health (medical certificates), finance (open bank accounts), education (academic diplomas), transport (digital passport), mobility (vehicle registration), and others, this well-established ecosystem of standards, reference implementations, and trust governance models opens a new opportunity in the sports sector.

Standardization of Sports Decentralized Credentials

During the conversations at AthTech, we discussed the feasibility of contributing with new complementary scenarios and stakeholders, starting with sports federations as license Issuers and other official attestations required for participation in competitions (records, competition permits, and achievements). Moreover, federations could become Verifiers of medical certificates, insurance attestations, police checks (for coaches), antidoping checks, among others. Athletes, coaches, officials, even fans —i.e., Wallet Holders— will be able to store and present these credentials from their wallets in a wide range of scenarios, from registering for competitions to presenting their qualifications and permits to receiving winner vouchers or finalist diplomas.

The theory was supported by real demands and examples. Just to name a few inspirations:

• ID-based registration. Swiss Athletics, a step ahead, has already implemented a registration system that allows Swiss runners to register for competitions using their government-issued digital ID. The system is in production and ready to be extended with new European standards.
• Runner medical certificate. Fédération Française d’Athlétisme, the French federation, requires athletes to present a self-issued medical certificate to participate in road races. This is a great opportunity to define a digital mechanism to be reused across European road racing.  
• Italian Runners‘ Wallet. FIDAL, the Athletics Italian Federation, supported by SportWave, launched RunCard, an app with a wallet and official runner identification for participating in relevant competitions when they don’t have a traditional athlete license.
• International Age-Category Masters Competitions. OpenTrack, the official web-based competition management system used by the European Masters Association (EMA) for international competitions, presented the real challenge (pain) of manually verifying the valid licenses and competition categories of 4500+ athletes from across Europe.

Next Steps: Use Case Collection and Credential Models

Consensus was reached, so the objective is to start researching these new opportunities by collecting use cases and scenarios and standardizing the credentials required for them. The group will cover the requirements for Athletics in Europe and globally, to define a new set of technical specifications for any sports worldwide with similar multi-stakeholder ecosystems involving federations, clubs, athletes, coaches, and external service providers.

We will start with the collaborative documents in the CG repository and organize monthly meetings for synchronization. In parallel, we are developing proof-of-concept solutions to showcase the benefits of this new approach. Join the forum, take part in the poll for the upcoming teleconferences, and drop us a message if you are interested.