GENEVA (AP) — A top European court gave a legal opinion Thursday that risks delivering another defeat to the authority of sports bodies in Switzerland.
The Court of Justice of the European Union published its preliminary opinion in a case brought by a Belgian soccer club against FIFA that now could challenge the established legal system in Olympic sports.
The court’s advocate general advised its judges to rule eventually that national courts in EU member states should be able to review verdicts from the Swiss-based Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS).
CAS was created in 1984 to give sports a unified and binding legal forum for settling disputes and appeals based in the International Olympic Committee's home city Lausanne in Switzerland, which is not among the 27 EU members.
The same European court in Luxembourg has in the last 14 months given two major rulings under EU competition law — in the Super League case and Lassana Diarra transfer dispute — that challenged the authority of soccer bodies FIFA and UEFA.
The latest opinion continues a decade-long legal fight by Belgian club RFC Seraing and investment fund Doyen Sports against FIFA rules prohibiting third-party ownership of a player’s registration and transfer rights. They asked a commercial court in Brussels in 2015 to review if the FIFA rules breached EU law.
If confirmed by judges in Luxembourg — in a ruling likely within months to send the case back to Brussels — it would open up the legal system that currently binds athletes, officials and clubs to accept appeal verdicts they must seek at CAS.
“FIFA’s sports arbitration clauses are mandatory,” the European court said in summarizing the opinion by Advocate General Tamara Ćapeta. “(CAS) awards rendered under that system cannot therefore be limited to public policy issues and must be open to full judicial review.”
EU member states “must enable direct access to a court with the power to judicially review FIFA’s rules for their compatibility with EU law,” the European court said.
CAS and FIFA declined to comment Thursday.
Soccer is by far the biggest client in the CAS caseload of about 950 registered each year. FIFA’s contribution of 2.5 million Swiss francs ($2.75 million) to CAS in 2023 was more than 10% of the court’s revenue that year.
CAS verdicts can be challenged at Switzerland’s supreme court in Lausanne on limited procedural grounds and are rarely overturned. Seraing and Doyen lost at the Swiss Federal Tribunal in 2018.
The previous Luxembourg rulings pushed FIFA and UEFA to amend rules that previously blocked commercial rivals proposing new competitions, and draft interim transfer rules relating to contracts terminated for cause.
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Graham Dunbar, The Associated Press
