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.

Source: UEFA’s eighth club licensing benchmarking report on European football, slide 108.

 Furthermore, net debt as a percentage of revenue has fallen from 65% in 2009 to 40% in 2015.[1]

Source: UEFA’s eighth club licensing benchmarking report on European football, slide 125.

UEFA’s Financial Fair Play vindicated?

As was clear from the UEFA Club Licensing Benchmarking Report Financial Year ending 2011, the deficit of clubs with a UEFA License increased from €0.6 billion in 2007 to a peak of €1.7 billion in 2011, with some historic European football clubs, like FC Parma, going bankrupt. Though the increasing indebtedness might have been to a large extent related to the global economic crisis[2], UEFA considered that it was mainly the result of irresponsible spending by the clubs.[3] Consequently, UEFA introduced the FFP Regulations, whose objectives are, inter alia, improving the economic and financial capabilities of clubs; introducing more discipline and rationality in club football finances; encouraging clubs to operate on the basis of their own revenues; and protecting the long-term viability and sustainability of European club football. UEFA’s primary tool to achieve those is the break-even requirement imposed on clubs having qualified for a UEFA club competition.[4] Accordingly, clubs must demonstrate that their expenditure does not exceed their revenue  should they wish to avoid sanctions by the UEFA Club Financial Control Body.[5] With these objectives in mind, it does not come as a surprise that UEFA is celebrating in this report the success of the FFP regulations.

The negative side effect of FFP: The rise of the 1%

The FFP regulations are still facing controversy and legal challenges in spite of (or, maybe, because of) the results highlighted in this report. As early as 2012, critics pointed out that FFP could nurture the competitive imbalance between European football clubs. Basically, a successful club will yield more revenue, leading to the club being able to afford better players, in turn leading to the club being more successful, and so on and so forth. Since small clubs are no longer allowed to overinvest their way to a greater market size in the future, people predicted that FFP would trigger an era of competitive imbalance.[6] Indeed, this competitive imbalance was one of the primary arguments used by player agent Striani and his lawyer Dupont in their complaint to the European Commission.[7]

UEFA has so far successfully managed to withstand the legal challenges launched against the FFP rules, such as a Commission complaint, a preliminary reference to the Court of Justice of the EU, challenges in front of Belgian courts, a challenge in front of a French court, and a challenge in front of the Court of Arbitration for Sport. However, it is now forced to acknowledge that “the top 15 European clubs have added €1.51bn in sponsorship and commercial revenues in the last six years (148% increase), compared to the €453m added by the rest of the approximately 700 top-division clubs in Europe (17% increase)”.[8] UEFA is clearly concerned about the increasing gap between the “global super clubs” and the rest, though it is adamant that “overspending and unsustainable business models cannot be the answer to financial inequality”.[9]

Nonetheless, it is not completely fair to argue that by attempting to solve one problem (i.e. reducing the increasing debts of football clubs) UEFA single-handedly created another problem (i.e. the growing inequality between the global super clubs and the rest).[10] There are of course other factors that contributed to this increasing financial gap, most notably the discrepancies in incomes derived from the selling of media rights at national level. As can be seen in UEFA’s latest Benchmarking report, English Premier League clubs received an average of €108m for their media rights in 2015. This figure is considerably higher than other clubs from the “top five leagues”, namely the Italian (€47.7m), Spanish (€36.7m), German (€36.1m) and French clubs (€24.9m).[11] In fact, 17 out of the top 20 clubs by broadcast revenues in 2015 are English, the other three being Real Madrid, FC Barcelona and Juventus.[12] Nonetheless, even though UEFA is not responsible for the differences in media rights revenue, the FFP Regulations remain a clear obstacle for clubs from other leagues to get investment from alternative sources.  

What has UEFA done to counter this growing inequality?

The pressing question on many people’s mind is whether UEFA will, or even can, do something about the ever-growing financial inequality between football clubs. The FFP Regulations can be changed, as was demonstrated in 2015. An important innovation in this regard was the introduction of Annex XII on voluntary agreements with UEFA for the break-even requirement. Under this Annex, UEFA allows, inter alia, a club to apply for such an agreement if the club has been subject to a significant change in ownership and/or control within the 12 months preceding the application deadline.[13] When applying for a voluntary agreement the club will (among other obligations) need to:

- submit a long-term business plan, including future break-even information;
- demonstrate its ability to continue as a going concern until at least the end of the period covered by the voluntary agreement;
- and submit an irrevocable commitment by an equity participant (i.e. shareholder) to make contributions for an amount at least equal to the aggregate future break-even deficits for all the reporting periods covered by the voluntary agreement.[14]

The relaxation of the FFP Regulations to leave more room for investment has probably led to an increase of foreign acquisitions of European football clubs. As the graph below shows, only four clubs were bought by non-Europeans in the years 2012 and 2013, a period in which a stricter version of the FFP Regulations was in force, whole nine clubs were bought in 2016 alone, seven of which were bought by Chinese investors.

Source: UEFA’s eighth club licensing benchmarking report on European football, slide 56.

Nonetheless, upcoming media rights deals will ensure financial inequality for years to come, regardless of any particular FFP relaxation. It is estimated that Premier League clubs will receive an average of €141m per season for the 2016/17 – 2018/19, while e.g. Spanish clubs are predicted to make an average of ‘only’ €64m for the 2016/17 season.[15] Meanwhile, the highest earning Dutch club (Ajax) is expected to make a meagre €9.3m from the selling of its media rights for the 2016/17 season.  

Conclusion: Can UEFA equalize?

With the financial gap between clubs increasing instead of decreasing, should UEFA’s regulatory focus shift from good corporate governance (limited debt, small deficit) to redistribution and the fight against inequalities in football? The recently installed UEFA President Aleksander Čeverin held that “UEFA, together with its stakeholders, will need to continuously review and adapt its regulations”[16], but it is unclear what concrete adaptations he has in mind.

Possible options to tackle inequality would include: limiting media rights income; sharing media rights income at a European level; introducing salary caps; or even introducing a solidarity mechanism that would oblige clubs to redistribute some of their income to poorer clubs.[17] However, such proposals will always be strongly resisted by rich clubs, which are in a position to threaten to put in place a breakaway league at any time.[18] UEFA is hardly equipped to resist them. Unless UEFA’s regulatory monopoly is fully recognized and endorsed by the European Commission, it will not be able to face down a breakaway rebellion. Instead, it risks facing a FIBA-like bitter and costly secession. Hence, for UEFA the status quo remains the safest option, and facing criticisms from small clubs way less harmful economically and politically.

A final option, favoured by the many opponents of FFP, would be to abandon FFP all together. This way, there would be no more restrictions to (private) investors willing to pour their (often borrowed) money in (European) football clubs. However, it would also imply renouncing the key achievement of FFP, European football clubs are financially way healthier than in 2009 and their governance better scrutinized. Furthermore, taking into account the Premier League’s latest media rights deal, it is questionable whether abandoning FFP could in any way lead to a narrower gap between the rich clubs and the rest. 

[1] The definition of net debt according to UEFA includes net borrowings (i.e. bank overdrafts and loans, other loans and accounts payable to related parties less cash and cash equivalents) and the net player transfer balance (i.e. the net of accounts receivable and payable from player transfers) – see UEFA’s eighth club licensing benchmarking report on European football, slide 125

[2] Oskar van Maren, “The Real Madrid case: A State aid case (un)like any other?” (2015) Competition Law Review, Volume 11 Issue 1, pages 86-87.

[3] See for example, UEFA Club Licensing Benchmarking Report Financial Year ending 2008, slide 4.

[4] Article 2 (2) of both the 2012 and 2015 FFP Regulations.

[5] 58-63 of the FFP Regulations. Article 61 allows for an acceptable deviation of €5 million, i.e. the maximum aggregate break-even deficit possible for a club to be deemed in compliance with the break-even requirement.

[6] Markus Sass, “Long-term Competitive Balance under UEFA Financial Fair Play Regulations” (2012), Working Paper No. 5/2012.

[7] For an analysis of FFP under EU competition law, see for example Stefan Szymanski, “Financial Fair Play and the law Part III: Guest post by Professor Stephen Weatherill”, 14 May 2013, Soccernomics.

[8] UEFA Press release of 12 January 2017, “European club football’s financial turnaround”.

[9] Ibid.

[10] In fact, the discussion on financial balance between football clubs has been a constant theme for decades. Particularly the elaborated opinion of A.G. Lenz in the Bosman case is worth reading in that regard (paras. 218-234).

[11] UEFA’s eighth club licensing benchmarking report on European football, slide 74.

[12] Ibid, slide 75.

[13] Annex XII under A (2)iii) of the 2015 FFP Regulations. The application deadline is the 31 December preceding the licence season in which the voluntary agreement would come into force.

[14] Annex XII under B of the 2015 FFP Regulations.

[15] FC Barcelona and Real Madrid are expected to make €150m and €143m respectively, meaning that the other clubs would receive an average of €55m.

[16] UEFA Press release of 12 January 2017, “European club football’s financial turnaround”.

[17] Once again, see the opinion of A.G. Lenz in the Bosman case (paras. 218-234).

[18] Threatening to put in place a breakaway (European) league is a favoured method by some of the top clubs. For example, during last week’s row it had with La Liga following the postponement of the Celta – Real Madrid game, Real Madrid held that the Spanish league is not very well organised and that they are better off playing in a European Super League.

It took only days for the de facto immunity of the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) awards from State court interference to collapse like a house of cards on the grounds of the public policy exception mandated under Article V(2)(b) of the New York Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards . On 15 January 2015, the Munich Court of Appeals signalled an unprecedented turn in the longstanding legal dispute between the German speed skater, Claudia Pechstein, and the International Skating Union (ISU). It refused to recognise a CAS arbitral award, confirming the validity of a doping ban, on the grounds that it violated a core principle of German cartel law which forms part of the German public policy. A few weeks before, namely on 30 December 2014, the Court of Appeal of Bremen held a CAS award, which ordered the German Club, SV Wilhelmshaven, to pay ‘training compensation’, unenforceable for non-compliance with mandatory European Union law and, thereby, for violation of German ordre public.

Although none of these decisions is yet final, with two red cards in a row, one could presume that the ‘death’ of CAS is closer than ever. Beyond such extreme and rather unconvincing predictions, the two cases set a fundamental precedent: sports arbitration, like all arbitration proceedings, shall abide by minimum standards of institutional impartiality and independence (Pechstein) and apply mandatory EU law (SV Wilhelmshaven).[1] Nevertheless and without prejudice to the need for a potential institutional reform of the CAS (see our analysis here), from a purely international arbitration point of view, the two German courts’ decisions brought into surface the controversial question of the powers of national courts in enforcement proceedings to review CAS arbitral awards with regard to the application of mandatory rules. The Pechstein case illustrates well the potential conflict between two apparently competing policies: the finality of CAS awards and the respect of public policy. In the SV Wilhelmshaven case, the Court went even a step further by implying that sport associations have the ‘duty’ (!) to review a CAS award with regard to its compatibility with German public policy.[2] In view of its uniqueness and complexity, this aspect of the SV Wilhelmshaven case deserves a thorough examination in a future blogpost.

In this blogpost, we will argue that the Pechstein case could be considered as a borderline case with regard to the limits of national courts’ power when scrutinizing CAS awards’ compatibility with domestic public policy. Challenging the validity of CAS awards before national courts, however, is something new under the sun of sports arbitration and could prove fatal for the finality of CAS awards, which is a sine qua non safeguard of procedural equal treatment among athletes[3] and legal coherence in sports law. Should athletes rely on national courts to police the institutional flaws of the CAS? Or is it high time for the Swiss Federal Tribunal (SFT) to abandon the hands-off deferential approach towards CAS arbitration and adopt a broader scope of review in the sporting context?

In this regard, the key claim is the following: national courts’ decisions should not threaten CAS arbitration as long as the Swiss Federal Tribunal review guarantees a minimum quality of CAS arbitrators’ work on the merits.

The Pechstein case: Testing the limits of a national court’s power to review a CAS award

In the latest decision of the Pechstein saga, the Higher Regional Court in Munich found the underlying arbitration agreement between the athlete and ISU in favour of the CAS invalid and that the CAS award issued on the basis of that agreement violated mandatory German cartel law prohibits abusive conduct by companies that have a dominant position on a particular market. The ISU, as sole organizer of speed skating world championship, enjoys a monopolistic position in speed skating and forced the athlete to sign the arbitration agreement at issue. Initially, the Court hold that the arbitration agreement as a prerequisite to the athlete’s participation in competitions does not constitute per se an abuse of a dominant position, since it responds to the specificity of sport and particularly to the need of consistency in sports disputes. However, considering the decisive influence of sports organizations on the selection and appointment of arbitrators under the CAS regulations, the Court concluded that the independence of CAS is questionable. In this light, forcing the athletes to sign an arbitration agreement in favour of a rather dependent and partial tribunal would constitute an abuse of the international sports organizations’ dominant position in the market, thereby infringing the mandatory German antitrust law. More importantly, unlike the First Instance Court, the Higher Regional Court concluded that the res judicata effect of the CAS award does not prevent the athlete from bringing her claim before the Court. Instead, it found  that the recognition of the CAS award would be contrary to Germany’s public policy, since it would perpetuate the abuse of ISU dominant market position.

From a substantive point of view it is evident that the decision primarily concerns the independence of CAS arbitration. However, considering that the Court based its reasoning on the application of German competition law, it could also serve as a model for an abuse of dominant position in the meaning of Article 102 TFEU[4], since the decision provides important insights on the role of a national court in tackling competition law issues at the enforcement stage of an arbitral award. In the Pechstein case, the Court examined the enforcement of a CAS award, which failed to deal with competition law, since the issue was not raised during the arbitral proceedings.[5] Indeed, a competition law issue was never raised before the CAS and neither before the Swiss Federal Tribunal. Interestingly enough, the invalidity of the forced arbitration agreements was raised only in the German courts proceedings.

Given the mandatory nature of competition law, one could argue that if the matter was not raised during the arbitration proceedings by the parties or ex officio by the arbitrators, it could still be considered in enforcement proceedings.[6] However, this approach could hardly be followed in a situation where the applicability of competition law is not prima facie evident and the alleged breach would in no case amount to a hard-core violation of competition law.[7] The answer to this dilemma is to be found in the difficult balance between the public interest in the application and enforcement of competition law on the one hand and the public interest in the finality of CAS arbitral awards on the other. In this light, the following remarks can be made regarding the Pechstein case.

First, it is debatable whether the enforcement of the CAS award results in serious violation of competition law.[8] The Court alleged violation of German cartel law based on the structural imbalance of the CAS and the subsequent challenge of its independence. However, this was rather an examination of the potential effects of the absence of CAS independence which could be hardly interpreted as a hard-core violation of competition law. While the CAS is still “perfectible”[9], the German Court’s decision did not clearly demonstrate to what extent the so-called structural imbalance actually weighted against Pechstein before the CAS. Moreover, one cannot not exclude the possibility that a national court reviewing a CAS awards would be less neutral than the CAS itself as it may have the unconscious intention to safeguard its own athlete.[10] Furthermore, as Nathalia Voser interestigly remarks, the Pechstein ruling failed to provide an assessment of actual excluding and exploitative effects of the forced arbitration clause, in absence of which, it is questionable whether the rules of an arbitral institution could be considered anticompetitive.

Even assuming that the violation of competition law is serious, it is problematic that this issue was raised only in the proceedings before the national courts. The German Court argued that the athlete had no choice but to sign the arbitration agreement and the fact that she never raised a violation of competition law could not justify a perpetuation of the abuse of a dominant position by the ISU.[11] Nevertheless, this argument seems hardly convincing. A refusal of enforcement of an award for failure to apply competition law in the arbitration proceedings, notwithstanding that the party which would have benefited from its application did not raise the issue during the arbitration, could be conceived as an invitation to the parties to behave in bad faith.[12] Had Pechstein won before the CAS, she would not challenge the validity of the arbitration agreement and the Court would not delve into the conformity of the forced arbitration agreement with competition law.

For these reasons, it is the opinion of the author that competition law issues should have been raised in a timely fashion in their proper venue, before the arbitrators. This solution does not entail a danger of systematic violation of competition rules, since the national courts can still protect athletes in case of hard-core violations. On the contrary, treating competition law as a second bite of a cherry for athletes seems to be at odds with the rationale of the public policy exemption and open the road to abusive practices seriously compromising the principle of finality of CAS awards.

The counterbalance? A stricter review of the CAS awards by the Swiss Federal Tribunal (SFT)

In the wake of the Pechstein ruling, it is almost certain that more athletes will resort to national courts to challenge CAS awards aiming to reverse them in their favour and even claim damages against the sports governing bodies imposing sanctions on the basis of these awards. This can lead to a problematic situation as States adopt different standards of protection of fundamental rights of the athletes and arbitration clauses inserted in statutes of international sports federations can potentially conflict with non-Swiss legal systems.[13] Furthermore, it has been demonstrated in this blogpost that a meticulous review of the application of mandatory rules by national courts poses a serious risk for the effectiveness of arbitration without necessarily guaranteeing much better protection of public policy.

In this light, the concentration of jurisdiction at a single forum is an overriding need in order to ensure that the athletes participating in competitions are on equal footing.[14] Nevertheless, this does not come without limits. In view of the ‘forced’ nature of sports arbitration and the specificity of sports disputes, athletes should enjoy further safeguards for their rights. To this end, the Swiss Federal Tribunal (SFT) should play a key role. By adopting a broader and stricter review of the CAS awards, (namely one that would really take into account the forced nature of sports arbitration) the SFT could at the same time safeguard the enforceability of CAS awards and uniform application of sports law at domestic and international level, while guaranteeing athletes’ fundamental rights.

In fact, a CAS award can be challenged before the SFT on the limited grounds provided in Article 190 (2) PILA and particularly: (a) if the sole arbitrator or the arbitral tribunal was not properly appointed or composed; (b) if the arbitral tribunal erroneously held that it had or did not have jurisdiction; (c) if the arbitral tribunal ruled on matters beyond the claims submitted to it or if it failed to rule on one of the claims; (d) if the equality of the parties or their right to be heard in an adversarial proceeding was not respected; or (e) if the award is incompatible with public policy. The current SFT jurisprudence reviewing CAS awards has demonstrated its capacity to protect parties’ procedural rights.[15] Nonetheless, when it comes to the merits of the dispute, the SFT has consistently adopted a hands-off approach by interpreting the concept of incompatibility with public policy under Article 190 (2)(e) very narrowly, covering only those fundamental principles that are widely recognized and should underlie any system of law according to the prevailing conceptions in Switzerland.[16] For example, in practice, this means that the SFT will not consider whether an award is compatible with EU competition law and EU fundamental principles, irrespective of whether such an award could be enforced within the EU, since they are not embedded in Swiss legal tradition.

It was only in 2012 that the SFT for the first time in over twenty years took the bold step to annul a CAS award on the basis of a violation of substantive public policy.[17] In this judgment, the SFT has answered the criticism that its substantive review under Art 190(2) (e) PILA is a dead letter[18] and more importantly it made it clear that the CAS has the primary responsibility of ensuring that its awards are fair on the merits and the SFT’s role is to examine whether the CAS successfully assumed this duty. However, the Matuzalem ruling instead of marking a turning point in the SFT review on the merits, was soon proven to be a rare exception. The repeated ‘excuse’ of the SFT for this pro-CAS arbitration approach has been that Art 190(2) (e) PILA mandates an excessively limited review on the merits. The CAS arbitration being under the sword of Damocles, should this hands-off approach be sustained?

This question has to be answered negatively. In fact, Chapter 12 of the PILA, including Article 190(2), was originally drafted for the purpose of governing international commercial arbitration. Nevertheless, in its almost 20 years of practice, the SFT has acknowledged that sports arbitration should be treated differently than standard commercial arbitration.[19] It could be argued, therefore, that in view of the particularity of sports arbitration, the restrictive reading of substantive public policy under Art 190 (2)(e) could be tolerated in international commercial arbitration, but not for CAS arbitration. It has been suggested, instead, that in view of protecting athletes’ fundamental rights, the SFT should engage in a broader review and take into account the specificity of sports arbitration in defining the scope of its review on the merits of CAS awards.[20] A suggestion has also been made for a redefinition of public policy under which the SFT could freely review whether CAS has complied with the essential rights of athletes.[21] Considering that athletes are forced to accept CAS arbitration, a broader scope of review that would ensure a minimum quality guarantee of the CAS awards on the merits should be offered to athletes. Therefore, a potential institutional reform of the CAS to ensure independence and impartiality coupled with a more stringent review of its awards by the SFT should bring about a more restraint approach of national courts when reviewing CAS awards’ compliance with domestic public policy and ensure the subsequent finality of CAS awards.

[1] B Hess and F Kaps, ‘Claudia Pechstein and SV Wilhelmshaven: Two German Higher Regional Courts Challenge the Court of Arbitration for Sport’ (6 February 2015).

[2] Hanseatisches Oberlandesgericht in Bremen, SV Wilhelmshaven e.V. gegen Norddeutscher Fußball-Verband e.V. (30 Dezember 2014) “i) Der Senat sieht weder sich noch den Beklagten durch die Satzung des Beklagten und die darin in Bezug genommene Satzung des DFB daran gehindert, die Ent-scheidung des Beklagten vom 13.01.2014 unter diesem rechtlichen Aspekt zu prüfen und im Hinblick auf die Unvereinbarkeit der der Vereinsstrafe zugrunde liegenden Festsetzung der Ausbildungsentschädigung mit Art. 45 AEUV die Rechtswidrigkeit des angegriffenen Zwangsabstiegs der ersten Herrenmann-schaft festzustellen. Im Gegenteil war der Beklagte verpflichtet, die „umzuset-zende“ Disziplinarentscheidung und den ihr zugrunde liegenden CAS-Schiedsspruch darauf zu überprüfen, ob diesen nicht zwingendes nationales oder internationales Recht entgegensteht.’’

[3] A Rigozzi, ‘International Sports Arbitration: Why does Swiss Law Matter?’ in Citius, Altius, Fortius-Mélanges en l’ honneur de Denis Oswald (2012), 446.

[4]A Duval, ‘The Pechstein ruling of the Oberlandesgericht München - Time for a new reform of CAS?’ (19 January 2015).

[5] A similar example of this situation is the Eco Swiss v Benetton arbitration, which led to the C-126/97 judgement of the Court of Justice.

[6] L Radicati di Brozolo, ‘Antitrust: a paradigm of the relations between mandatory rules and arbitration-a fresh look at the “second look” ’ (2004) 7 (1) International Arbitration Law Review, 31.

[7] Ibid

[8]  For an interesting analysis on the competition law perspectives of the Pechstein case, see N Voser ‘The Most Recent Decision in the Pechstein Saga: Red Flag for Sports Arbitration?’ (22 January 2015)

[9] Decision 4P.267–270/2002 du 27 mai 2003, Lazutina c. CIO, ATF 129 III 445, Bull. ASA 2003, 465

[10] L Mintas, ‘Dr Laila Mintas: Is this the end of CAS arbitration?’ (3 February 2015)

[11] OLG München · Teil-Urteil vom 15. Januar 2015 · Az. U 1110/14 Kart, paras 135 and 137.

[12] L Radicati di Brozolo (n 5) 32.

[13] J Lukomski, ‘Arbitration clauses in sport governing bodies statutes: consent or constraint? Analysis from the perspective of Article 6(1) of the ECHR’ (2013) 13 The International Sports Law Journal, 69

[14] S Netzle, ‘Jurisdiction of arbitral tribunals in sports matters : arbitration agreements by reference to regulations of sports organisations’ in Arbitration of sports-related disputes (1998,  Basel : Association suisse de l'arbitrage) 47

[15] A Rigozzi, ‘L’importance du droit suisse de l’arbitrage dans la résolution des litiges sportifs internationaux’ (2013) Revue de droit suisse 2013, 320.

[16] Ibid

[17] Swiss Federal Tribunal, Francelino Da Silva Matuzalem v FIFA (27 March 2012) 4A_558/2011

[18] P Landolt, ‘Annulment of Swiss International Arbitration Awards for Incompatibility with Substantive Public Policy: First Annulment in over Twenty Years’ (2012) 27 MEALEY’S International Arbitration Report Issue 4, 22.

[19] Swiss Federal Tribunal, Guillermo Cañas v. ATP Tour (22 March 2007) 4P.172/2006 See also, A Rigozzi (n 13), 321-322.

[20] M Baddeley, ‘La décision Cañas: nouvelles règles du jeu pour l’arbitrage international du sport’ (2007)  CAUSASPORT 2007, 161.

[21] A Rigozzi (n 13), 325.