Economic Fairness in Sports Governance: Revised Federation Autonomy Following European Superleague in: European Yearbook of International Economic Law,
In its European Superleague judgement, the European Court of Justice set a high standard for sport governing bodies to justify decisions that combine both sporting and commercial elements. While sporting federations previously enjoyed a vast degree of autonomy not only for setting the standards of the game, but also to determine economic rules, such as commercialization and external sponsor investments, recent case-law of the European Court of Justice (CJEU) has markedly confined this extensive self-governance. In stipulating that federation rules for third party market access and championship participation must be transparent, objective, sufficiently precise and non-discriminatory, the Court has essentially subjected the federations’ decisions to an external review and revised the so-called ‘autonomy of sports’. This approach not only aligns sport governance with general principles of European economic law, but signals the Court’s aim to establish a holistic concept of ‘economic fairness’ that now pertains to the sport sector. This aim not only concerns the rights of companies competing with the federation for services, but also relates to the economic status of the athletes themselves. As this requires a substantial reconsideration of the existing sports governance framework, the following chapter seeks to identify the parameters that constitute the notion of economic fairness in the sport sector and how these could effectively be implemented in practice.
