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IN THE SPOTLIGHT
"Four of a Kind: The CJEU's Week of Sport Rulings"
The house always deals more than one card. In a single week, the Court of Justice of the European Union laid down four rulings that reshape the legal architecture of professional sport. Here's the hand.
Card 1 -
The Ace of Clubs: ROGON v. DFB (C-428/23, 9 July 2026)
Suit: Competition Law. The Court held that a national federation's rules on players' agents can escape the ban on cartels if they pursue a genuine
public-interest objective - reviving the Wouters/Meca-Medina exception. Verdict: national courts must now check proportionality case by case.
Card 2 -
The King of Governance: RRC Sports v. FIFA (C-209/23, 16 July 2026)
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Suit: Competition Law, global edition. The twin case to Card 1, but aimed at FIFA's worldwide Football Agent Regulations - fee caps, the ban on dual representation, mandatory payment through FIFA's clearing house. The Court found none of these measures automatically caught by the ban on cartels: the fee cap isn't a "restriction by object," and the same reasoning extends to the licensing rule, the dual-representation ban, and the clearing-house obligation, all of which the Court treated as capable, in principle, of pursuing legitimate objectives - reducing conflicts of interest, curbing runaway commissions, and adding transparency to a market long criticised as opaque. As with Card 1, it's now up to the national courts to check that each measure is actually proportionate to those aims. A real win for FIFA's governance model, but not an unconditional one.
Card 3 -
The Queen of Privacy: NADA Austria (C-474/24, 14 July 2026)
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Suit: Data Protection. Publishing the names of doping offenders online can comply with GDPR - but only if authorities weigh the athlete's rights case by case before hitting publish. Transparency wins, but it is not a blank check.
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The Jack of Justice: FIGC and CONI (C-424/24 & C-425/24, 16 July 2026)
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Suit: Fundamental Rights. The Agnelli/Arrivabene case. Sports sanctions that block someone's career across the whole EU must be open to review by an independent court with the power to annul them - sports justice isn't beyond the reach of ordinary law.
The Showdown
Lay these four cards face-up next to each other and a single pattern emerges: the Court is no longer asking whether sports federations can regulate themselves - that question was settled decades ago with Bosman and Meca-Medina - it's now asking who checks the regulator.
In the DFB and FIFA agent cases, the answer is competition law's proportionality test: a federation can restrict the market, but only if it can show, with evidence, that the restriction serves a real public-interest goal and doesn't go further than necessary. That's not a rubber stamp. It shifts the burden onto FIFA and national federations to actually justify their rulebooks in front of a judge, rather than simply invoking "the specificity of sport" as a magic phrase.
The NADA Austria ruling plays a quieter but equally structural role. It confirms that anti-doping enforcement doesn't get a free pass from data protection law just because it serves the integrity of competition. Publishing a sanctioned athlete's name is legitimate transparency - but only if someone actually stops to weigh the athlete's privacy against the public interest before clicking "publish," rather than treating disclosure as an automatic, box-ticking consequence of any ban. It's the same logic as the agent cases, transplanted into a different legal register: power exercised over an individual's rights needs a documented, case-by-case justification, not a blanket policy.
The FIGC/CONI judgment is where this logic reaches its most dramatic conclusion, because it strikes at the architecture of sports justice itself. For years, Italian sporting bodies have operated inside a closed loop: federal prosecutor, federal court of appeal, CONI's guarantee board - with ordinary courts locked out, able at most to award damages after the fact, never to annul the sanction. The Court has now said that when a disciplinary sanction touches rights protected by EU law - here, the freedom to pursue a professional activity anywhere in the Union - that closed loop cannot be the final word. An independent court must be able to step in, review it, and if necessary strike it down or suspend it. Whether that reopens the Agnelli-Arrivabene case specifically is a narrower, more technical question, but the principle it establishes runs well beyond Juventus and well beyond Italy.
Taken together, these four rulings sketch the outline of a genuine "administrative law of sport" being built one preliminary reference at a time. Federations keep their pen - they can still write rules on agents, doping, discipline - but every rule they write now has to survive contact with an external judge applying ordinary legal standards: competition law, data protection, effective judicial protection. The specificity of sport survives as a justification, not as an immunity.
What makes this particular week remarkable isn't any single card, but the fact that the Court dealt all four from the same underlying deck within days of each other. It reads less like coincidence and more like a coordinated clarification of where sport's private governance ends and the ordinary rule of law begins - a hand strong enough to make every federation in Europe look again at its own rulebook.
Bergamo - Bruxelles, 17 July 2026
Stefano Bastianon and Michele Colucci
FORTHCOMING PUBLICATIONS
Twenty Years after Meca-Medina:
The Enduring Legacy of the CJEU's Sports Law Revolution
S. Bastianon and M. Colucci eds., SLPC, August 2026
The European Union and Sport Handbook (III edition)
S. Bastianon and M. Colucci eds., SLPC, August 2026
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