Introduction: Sports as an influential phenomenon in various cultural, social, political and economic dimensions has a special place in societies. Today, the extensive growth of the sports industry in the world is always accompanied by two aspects of hardware and software. To achieve this goal, a comprehensive and fundamental plan is needed at the national level. The purpose of this study was to examine the content and thematic of the six previous development programs in the field of sports development in the community as a prelude to developing the seventh program by citing and using the knowledge and expertise of experts in this field to understand the requirements and considerations for the development and implementation of the next mega plan.
Methodology: This study was applied with a qualitative approach in terms of objective and descriptive-analytical in terms of the nature of the research data. Six previous development programs were analyzed and analyzed by means of content analysis. Then, with the method of strategic analysis resulting from a semi-structured interview with 13 experts (until theoretical saturation) who were identified in the snowball method, research data were extracted and analyzed using thematic analysis technique and theme network drawing. The audit indicators of qualitative research were reviewed and approved.
Results: The findings in the content analysis section showed that the trend of paying attention to the sports category was almost the same except for the second program. Although attention to public sports is almost uniform, championship and professional sports have received less attention. However, for this reason, the components mentioned in the plan were either not implemented, or the policies were vague and general. The lack of a systematic and logical all-round approach is quite evident considering the extent of effectiveness and the degree of importance of the category of sports in the society in the formulation of previous programs. However, in the analysis of the interviews, which were obtained after three steps of coding and summarizing, the extracted key themes led to the identification of 34 integrated themes and eight main themes. These broad themes include: "attention to the integration of health and sports; Attention to resistance economy; attention to knowledge-based sports; attention to privatization; Improving quality and productivity in sports; Modifying rules, structures and processes; Attention to the socio-cultural capacities of the society; Basic and professional sports were the platform for the development of championship sports.
Discussion: Considering the extensive changes in the conditions of the country, especially the changes in the demographic pyramid and the needs of the society, along with the availability of some existing infrastructures and capacities, it is necessary to pay more attention to the effective category of sports in the society.