Editor's Note: Ryan is Assistant
Professor at Thompson Rivers University, he defended his PhD at Erasmus
University Rotterdam in December 2015. His dissertation examined human rights
violations caused by international sporting events, and how international
sporting organisations may be held accountable for these violations.
“Serious sport…is
war minus the shooting.” – George Orwell
In May 2016, the
Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) admitted the Football
Federation of Kosovo (Kosovo) as a member. The voting was
close, with 28 member federations in favour, 24 opposed, and 2 whose votes were
declared invalid. The practical outcome of this decision is that Kosovo would
be able participate in the UEFA Euro championship, and that Kosovo teams could
qualify for the UEFA Champions’ League or Europa League. More...
On 12 January 2017 UEFA published its eighth club licensing benchmarking report on European
football, concerning the financial
year of 2015. In the press release that accompanied the report, UEFA proudly announced
that Financial Fair Play (FFP) has had a huge positive impact on European
football, creating a more stable financial environment. Important findings included
a rise of aggregate operating profits of €1.5bn in the last two years, compared
to losses of €700m in the two years immediately prior to the introduction of
Financial Fair Play.
Source: UEFA’s
eighth club licensing benchmarking report on European football, slide
107.
Meanwhile the aggregate losses dropped by 81% from
€1.7bn in 2011 to just over €300m in 2015.More...
Editor’s note: This report compiles all relevant news, events and
materials on International and European Sports Law based on the daily coverage
provided on our twitter feed @Sportslaw_asser. You are
invited to complete this survey via the comments section below, feel free to
add links to important cases, documents and articles we might have
overlooked.
The Headlines
The Diarra
ruling of the Tribunal of Charleroi
On 19 January 2017, the Hainaut Commercial Tribunal –
Charleroi rendered its decision on the lawsuit filed by the football player
Lassana Diarra against FIFA and the Belgian FA (URBSFA) for damages caused by
not being able to exercise the status of a professional football player during
the entire 2014/2015 season. The lawsuit is linked to the decision, rendered by
the FIFA Dispute Resolution Chamber (DRC) on April 2015, to support Lokomotiv’s
decision to terminate the player’s contract and to order Diarra to pay Lokomotiv
the amount of EUR 10,500,000 for having breached his contract. According to the
plaintiff, Diarra’s opportunity to be recruited by Sporting Charleroi was
denied due to the club being potentially considered jointly liable for Diarra’s
compensation pursuant to Article 17 (2) RSTP. The Belgian court held strongly
that “when the contract is terminated by the club, the player must have the
possibility to sign a new contract with a new employer, without restrictions to
his free movement”. This case highlighted, once again, the need to read
the RSTP in the light of EU law. Moreover, the decision is laying further
ground for broader challenges to the RSTP on the basis of EU law (for a deeper
insight into the Diarra ruling, see the recent blog written by our senior researcher
Antoine Duval) More...
Editor’s
note: Emilio García (emilio.garcia@uefa.ch) is a doctor in law and head of disciplinary and
integrity at UEFA. Before joining UEFA, he was the Spanish Football
Federation’s legal director (2004–12) and an arbitrator at the CAS (2012–13).In
this blog, Emilio García provides a brief review of a recent case before the Court
of Arbitration for Sport (CAS): Klubi
Sportiv Skënderbeu v UEFA
(CAS 2016/A/4650)[1], in
which he acted as main counsel for UEFA.
Sport and
match-fixing – A quick overview
Match-fixing is now legally defined as “an intentional
arrangement, act or omission aimed at an improper alteration of the result or
the course of a sports competition in order to remove all or part of the
unpredictable nature of the aforementioned sports competition with a view to
obtaining an undue advantage for oneself or for others”.[2]
It has been said that there has always been match-fixing in sport.[3]
From the ancient Olympic Games to the most important global sports competitions
of today, manipulation of results has always been an all-too-frequent occurrence.
We have seen a number of very prominent instances of
this kind of issue over the years. One of the most remarkable examples, which was
even the subject of a film,[4]
was the match-fixing episode during the 1919 World Series, where several
players from the Chicago White Sox were found guilty of accepting bribes and
deliberately losing matches against the Cincinnati Reds.[5]
The situation has changed considerably since then. In particular,
the globalisation of the sports betting industry has had a massive impact, with
recent studies estimating that between €200bn and €500bn is betted on sport
every year.[6]
Match-fixing does not just affect football either;[7]
it is also affecting other sports, most notably tennis.[8] More...
Editor's note: Marine Montejo is a graduate from the College of Europe in Bruges and
is currently an intern at the ASSER International Sports Law Centre.
On 3 June
2015, Sepp Blatter resigned as President of FIFA after another corruption scandal inside the world’s football
governing body was brought to light by the American authorities supported by
the Swiss prosecutor office. Two months after Michel Platini announced he would be a candidate for
the next FIFA Presidential election, on 25 September 2015, the Swiss prosecutor
opened an investigation against S.
Blatter on an alleged disloyal payment he authorised to M. Platini. On 8
October 2015, the FIFA Ethics Committee announced both of them were provisionally
suspended upon their hearings, a suspension that was later confirmed by CAS. In the end, M.
Platini was sanctioned with an eight years ban from
all football activities, later reduced to a six years ban by FIFA
Appeal Commission on 24 February 2016. In the meantime, he withdrew his candidacy to become the
next FIFA President. On 9 May 2016, after M. Platini appealed this sanction, the CAS confirmed the suspension but reduced it
to four years, leading to his resignation from the UEFA presidency and the
announcement of his intention to challenge the CAS award in front of the Swiss
Federal Tribunal.
On 19
September, the CAS finally published the full text of the award in the dispute between M.
Platini and FIFA. The award is in French as M. Platini requested that the
procedure be conducted in that language. You will find below a summary of the ‘highlights’
of the 63-page decision. More...
Editor’s note: This report compiles all relevant news, events and
materials on International and European Sports Law based on the daily coverage
provided on our twitter feed @Sportslaw_asser. You are invited to complete this survey via the
comments section below, feel free to add links to important cases, documents
and articles we might have overlooked.
The Headlines
Challenged
membership put a lot of emphasis on football federations in May. The Court of Arbitration for Sport (“CAS”) has
rendered an award, on 27 April 2016, ordering the FIFA Council to
submit the application of the Gibraltar Football Association (GFA) for FIFA
membership to the FIFA Congress (the body authorised to admit new members to FIFA). The GFA has sought since 1999 to become a member of
UEFA and FIFA. In May 2013, it became a
member of the UEFA and went on to seek membership of FIFA. More...
Editor’s note
Wil is working as a lawyer since 1980. He
started his legal career at Rechtshulp Rotterdam. Later on he worked for the
Dutch national trade union FNV and law firm Varrolaan Advocaten. Currently he
is participating in the Labour Law Section of lawfirm MHZ-advocaten in Schiedam
in the Netherlands. He is also a member of a joint committee advising the government
in labour issues.
Since 1991 he is dealing with the labour issues
of the trade union for professional football players VVCS and cyclists’ union
VVBW. Since 2002, he works for FIFPro, the worldwide union for professional
football players based in Hoofddorp in the Netherlands. He is involved in many
international football cases and provides legal support for FIFPro members all
over the world. Wil was also involved in the FIFPro Black Book campaign on
match fixing and corruption in Eastern Europe. More...
Rien ne va plus at FIFA. The news that FIFA’s Secretary General Jérôme Valcke
was put on leave and released from his
duties has been quickly overtaken by the opening of a criminal investigation targeting
both Blatter and Platini.
With FIFA hopping from one scandal to the next, one
tends to disregard the fact that it has been attempting (or rather pretending) to
improve the governance of the organisation for some years now. In previous
blogs (here and here), we
discussed the so-called ‘FIFA Governance Reform Project’, a project carried out
by the Independent Governance Committee (IGC) under the leadership of Prof. Dr.
Mark Pieth of the Basel Institute on Governance. Their third and final report, published
on 22 April 2014, listed a set of achievements made by FIFA in the area of good
governance since 2011, such as establishing an Audit and Compliance Committee (A&C).
However, the report also indicated the reform proposals that FIFA had not met.
These proposals included the introduction of term limits for specific FIFA
officials (e.g. the President) as well as introducing an integrity review
procedure for all the members of the Executive Committee (ExCo) and the
Standing Committees. More...
Ever since UEFA started imposing disciplinary
measures to football clubs for not complying with Financial Fair Play’s break-even requirement in 2014, it remained a mystery how UEFA’s
disciplinary bodies were enforcing the Club Licensing and Financial Fair Play (“FFP”)
regulations, what measures it was imposing, and what the justifications were for
the imposition of these measures. For over a year, the general public could
only take note of the 23 settlement agreements between Europe’s footballing
body and the clubs. The evidential obstacle for a proper analysis was that the
actual settlements remained confidential, as was stressed in several of our
previous Blogs.[1]
The information provided by the press releases lacked the necessary information
to answer the abovementioned questions.
On 24 April 2015, the UEFA Club Financial
Control Body lifted part of the veil by referring FC
Dynamo Moscow to the Adjudicatory Body. Finally, the Adjudicatory Body had the
opportunity to decide on a “FFP case. The anxiously-awaited Decision was reached by
the Adjudicatory Chamber on 19 June and published not long after. Now that the
Decision has been made public, a new stage of the debate regarding UEFA’s FFP
policy can start.More...
UEFA announced on 8
May that it had entered into Financial Fair Play settlement agreements with 10 European
football clubs. Together with the four other agreements made in February 2015, this brings the total to 14 FFP
settlements for 2015 and 23 since UEFA adopted modifications in its Procedural
rules and allowed settlements agreements to be made between the Clubs and the Chief
Investigator of the UEFA Club Financial Control Body (CFCB).[1]
In the two years during
which UEFA’s FFP regulations have been truly up and running we have witnessed the
centrality taken by the settlement procedure in their enforcement. It is
extremely rare for a club to be referred to the FFP adjudication chamber. In
fact, only the case regarding Dynamo Moscow has been referred to the adjudication chamber. Thus, having
a close look at the settlement practice of UEFA is crucial to gaining a good
understanding of the functioning of FFP. Hence, this blog offers a detailed
analysis of this year’s settlement agreements and compares them with last year’s settlements. More...