At the end of last week I attended the 6th annual conference of the Association for the Study of Sport and the European Union at Nottingham Trent University. I was presenting on the Premier League, but there were a number of other fascinating papers that gave me new insights into the interface between sport and law, the governance of football and future business trends. I will be reporting on these papers over the next week or so.
At the end of last week I attended the 6th annual conference of the Association for the Study of Sport and the European Union at Nottingham Trent University. I was presenting on the Premier League, but there were a number of other fascinating papers that gave me new insights into the interface between sport and law, the governance of football and future business trends. I will be reporting on these papers over the next week or so.
First, a word about the overall theme of the event. As the introduction to the conference pointed out, the pace of development of EU sports law since the mid-1990s has been astonishing. Before the Bosman judgment the EU’s dealings with sport were minimal and largely inconsequential.
The speedy intensification of this relationship was initially underpinned by private parties litigating first on the basis of the free movement of labour provisions and later competion law. What really fired things up was sustained, potent intervention in football by the EU, particularly the Commission. My personal view was that this often remote body saw an opportunity to get some street cred by getting involved in a sport of great interest to many EU citizens.
The early phase of anatgonism and litigation seems to have come to an end. It has been replaced by a more concilatory approach reflected in parallel but complementary regulation by the EU and football’s governing bodies.
That doesn’t mean that the scope for conflict is over. EU law, above all competition law, provides extensive opportunities to challenge the way in which sport has traditionally been run. It is important to recall that the Meca-Medina case refused to exempt sport from the extensive provisions of competition law.
The EU is certainly keen to use sport to promote other objectives such as health and education. This instrumental approach has been combined with intervention and support and is recognised by the insertion of sport into the Lisbon treaty in Article 165.
In little over a decade anjd a half the EU has transformed itself from an organisation with only a tangential and infrequent in sport into a key stakeholder in the regulation of sport. The genie is out of the bottle and the consequences are far-reaching as will be discussed in subsequent posts.