Run clubs, sponsors and who pays when someone gets hurt
Run clubs are free to join. That doesn’t make them free of legal risk.
Strava’s 2025 Year in Sport report found running clubs on its platform grew 3.5x globally. In Australia, plenty of clubs now have sponsors, product sampling and branded events. A few mates meeting for a run turns into a weekly gathering with merch, designated leaders and an audience, and at some point the people running it are operating something bigger than they set out to.
What is it, legally?
A lot of these clubs are an unincorporated association at best, or really just one founder trading under a club name. An unincorporated association isn’t a separate legal entity. It can’t hold a contract or receive money in its own right, so someone has to do that personally.
That raises the obvious questions. Who signs the sponsorship agreement? Who receives the money and decides how it’s spent? If the founder is collecting the cash and running the show, they may be carrying the whole thing personally, including any claim that comes out of it.
The injury question
A runner gets hit crossing a road while following the group. Someone collapses in the heat. A beginner gets left behind on a trail. A pedestrian gets taken out by the pack.
None of those automatically means someone is liable. Negligence turns on the facts. But the questions arrive quickly:
Who organised the session and set the route and pace?
What supervision or support were participants told to expect?
Could the founder, the run leaders or the committee be personally exposed?
Is the sponsor just paying for a logo, or helping deliver the event?
Are the organisers really volunteers?
This is the part most clubs won’t have thought about. Volunteer protections sit in state civil liability legislation, and the details differ from state to state. They’re generally built around unpaid community work for a community organisation. Once sponsorship money, free product or other benefits are flowing, it gets harder to say that’s what’s happening. How the protections apply to an informal group with commercial sponsors isn’t something we’d want anyone relying on without checking.
Insurance
The question we’d want answered first is whether there’s any insurance at all. In a lot of clubs there won’t be. Where there is, it might not cover the actual operator, the leaders, or what the group does on a Tuesday morning. So if someone is injured at a club-sanctioned event, who pays?
What to sort out early
Nothing here is complicated, but it’s much easier before something goes wrong:
Work out what the club actually is, and whether it should be an incorporated association or a company rather than a loose group.
Make sure the contracting party for any sponsorship is the right one, and that the agreement says what the sponsor does and doesn’t do at events.
Check what insurance exists, who it covers and what activities it covers. Ask the insurer directly rather than assuming.
Be clear about who leads, who decides and who is responsible for safety arrangements on the day.
Free attendance doesn’t settle any of this, and neither does calling it a club.
Our view is that once there’s a brand, money and regular numbers, organisers need to work out what they’re running and who’s covered before an incident works it out for them.
