The International Sports Physiotherapy Competencies and Standards 2025: The SportsComp Project on Higher Education to Improve Competency in Sports Physiotherapy.
Maria Constantinou, Carlo Ramponi, Bruno Tassignon and 12 others
The 2025 update to sports physiotherapy competencies makes soft skills (communication, empathy, cultural competence) explicit requirements, reworks the anti-doping competency into a broader ethical, legal, and cultural practice standard, and adds digital health.
The 11-competency structure is unchanged.
Key findings
1The 2025 competencies retain 11 areas but with significant changes to Competency 11 (renamed from 'Promotion of Fair Play and Anti-Doping Practices' to 'Ethical, Legal and Cultural Practice') and minor modifications to Competencies 1-10.
2Soft skills (effective communication, cultural competence, empathy, adaptability, leadership) and interdisciplinary collaboration emerged as essential themes across the updated competencies, alongside athlete-centred approaches and evidence-based practice.
3Competency 7 now expects a basic level of management and reporting rather than full business plan development, and Competency 8 no longer requires undertaking research; engaging with research in any manner (journal club, applying findings) is sufficient.
Still to come
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for PTs
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What it does not show
This is a consensus-based competency framework, not a clinical trial. It defines expected professional skills but does not test whether any specific intervention or approach improves patient outcomes. The qualitative phase involved only 26 participants across three focus groups and eight interviews, all conducted virtually, which limits the breadth of perspectives captured. The Delphi study drew on 143 sports physiotherapists, but these are self-selected professionals from 38 countries and may not represent the full range of practice settings. Two of the three eLearning courses were piloted with 'positive feedback' but no formal evaluation data or outcome measures are reported in this paper. The detailed competency standards are in Supplementary Material 1, which is not available here, so the specific behavioral standards cannot be assessed.
Declared interests
Funded by the European Union through an Erasmus+ grant (400,000 Euros, project reference 2023-1-FI01-KA220-HED-000155843). The authors state that views are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or EACEA. No commercial conflicts of interest are declared. The consortium includes ISEPA and four European universities.
The easy way to misread this
This is a professional competency framework, not a clinical trial. It defines the skills and standards expected of sports physiotherapists as a profession. It does not test any treatment, and nothing in it changes how you assess or treat a specific patient. Reading it as evidence that a particular rehabilitation approach works would be a category error.
Summarised by AI from the full paper, without a clinician reviewing it. Check it against the source before it changes what you do. Read it on PubMed →