Sports Law and Policy in the European Unionis a deliberately provocative title. It is not widely accepted that a discrete body of sports law has emerged or is emerging within the European Union (EU) or within national jurisdictions. Furthermore, given that the EU has no legal competence to develop a sports policy, one might ask (as I was by an eminent ‘sport and the law’ lawyer), ‘what the bloody hell has the Common Market got to do with sport?’ Browsing through the list of EU activities contained in Article 3 of the EU’s Treaty, it is clear that sport...

Despite the absence of a Treaty base, the EU currently operates a sports policy. This policy is the product of activity within the EU’s sports policy subsystem, a subsystem formed in response to the infamousBosmanruling. Prior to that the EU operated a highly polarised and fragmented sports policy characterised by two conflicting policy approaches to sport. First, the EU took a fleeting regulatory interest in sport. The ECJ and the Competition Policy Directorate intervened in sport to correct free movement and competition restrictions and distortions within the Single Market. These interventions were not however informed by the EU’s...

Traditionally in Britain, sports law has not been a theorised area of study. To some extent this unsatisfactory state of affairs still persists despite the teaching of sports law as an academic discipline on a growing number of University programmes. Sports law programmes are run by the Anglia Polytechnic University, Kings College, the Manchester Metropolitan University and the University of Westminster. The reporting and analysis of sports law is improving. Since 1993 the British Association for Sport and the Law based at the Manchester Metropolitan University has published theSport and the Law Journal. Since then a growing number of...

Sabatier’s Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) proves a useful starting point for those wishing to conceptualise the EU as comprising a myriad of policy subsystems. Operating within these subsystems is a wide range of actors who attempt to steer policy in a direction compatible with their belief system. Sabatier’s broad concept of subsystem actors stresses the political nature of subsystem activity. Sabatier defines a policy subsystem as a ‘set of actors who are involved in dealing with a policy problem’ (Sabatier 1988: 138). The policy ‘problem’ under investigation is the relationship between sport and the EU. Sabatier notes that ‘the most...

The ECJ is an important agenda setter. Court rulings play an important part in defining the content of the EU’s systemic agenda and the conditions under which an issue is transferred to the institutional agenda for active policy development. The ECJ’s line of reasoning in relation to sport has been developed within the context of a number of important institutional relationships. As such, the ECJ’s role in establishing the boundaries of EU sports regulation is not deterministic.

InWalrave, DonàandHeylens, the ECJ established important principles concerning the relationship between sport and EU law.¹ In the event, the lack...

In applying EU competition law to sport, the Directorate General for Competition Policy (herein referred to as the Commission) has been caught between three powerful forces. First, the Commission has a constitutional commitment to promote and protect the free market principles on which much of the Treaty of Rome is based. In this capacity it shares a close relationship with the ECJ. The ECJ’s rulings inWalrave, DonàandBosmanhave played an important role in placing sport on the EU’s systemic agenda in a regulatory form. The Commission has a constitutional obligation to follow the ECJ’s line of reasoning...

The EU has been characterised as a regulatory state (Majone 1996). Embedded within the EU’s constitutional and normative structure is a predisposition for the promulgation and enforcement of rules. In other words, the forces of negative as opposed to positive integration have historically driven the integration process (Pinder 1968, 1993). Knowledge about regulation and not budgets or votes has been the key resource EU officials have striven for. Yet knowledge has a ‘dark side’ – technocracy (Radaelli 1999b: 758) – and this essentially technocratic ‘path’ to integration has attracted criticism (see for instance Featherstone 1994). Although defended on the grounds...

A central objective of this text was to place some order on the seemingly random andad hocimpulses of EU activity in the sports sector. The book claims that today’s EU sports policy has developed out of a policy tension within the EU. The tension between the Single Market regulatory impulses of EU activity in sport and the EU’s political policy objectives for sport has contributed to the birth of a EUsports policydefined by the construction of theseparate territoriesapproach. In other words a distinct legal approach to sport has emerged. This implies the birth of...