The European Parliament has called on the European Commission to ‘clarify the legal status of football’ after adopting a report titled ‘On the future of professional football in Europe’, drafted by Ivo Belet (EPP-ED, BE).

The report asks the Commission to specify ‘under which conditions legitimate and adequate self-regulation is supported’. The report also backs UEFA’s club licensing system; calls for football to establish agreement on a collective insurance system; asks the Commission to investigate the adoption of collective sale of TV rights; supports UEFA’s home-grown player rule.

European Commissioner, Jan Figel, is currently consulting on a White Paper on sport, due to be published this summer. Sporting federations are concerned that attempts to define sport’s relationship to EU law could undermine their decision-making autonomy (See World Sports Law Report, Volume 04, Issue 10, October 2006).

The European Commission has launched a public consultation on its planned White Paper on sport. Click here to give your view.

The Select Committee on Science and Technology today released its Human Enhancement Technologies in Sport report, commissioned in March last year. Mike Morgan, a Solicitor with Hammonds, gives his opinion on key points within the report.

“Among the recommendations which struck me were:
1: Paragraph 57 - Suggestion that WADA-accredited labs should perform testing of commercial supplements for use in sport. If that were allowed to happen, the labs and WADA would be exposing themselves to potential legal action where athletes subsequently test positive for a banned substance emanating from a batch of that supplement. Also, it could lead to a repeat of the ATP debacle from 2003, where a number of players who had tested positive for a prohibited substance (nandrolone, in that particular case) were exonerated because the ATP had approved and apparently provided the suspected batch of contaminated supplements to those players. Whilst the issue of supplements is a very important one and does need further investigation, it is certainly not as black and white as the Committee's recommendation would suggest, particularly not from a legal point of view.”

2: “Paragraph 92 - Recommendation that the length of ban for a first time-offence be increased from two years to four years. This is an issue that has raged for over a decade and is subject to complex legal arguments, so it is surprising that the Committee has spent just one paragraph of the report considering the length of a ban for a first time offence, before recommending that a four-year ban should be applied ‘in all incidences of proven doping’”.

3: “Paragraph 76 - Restricting Olympic participation to athletes who have competed internationally in the 12 months before the Olympics. Twelve months is a very long time for athletes and such a policy would put a lot of unnecessary pressure on athletes to perform, particularly promising young athletes who are on the brink of becoming international. It also does not consider the position of athletes who choose to concentrate on their studies, or even those athletes who choose to ease off in the year prior to an Olympic year (as athletes often do, to minimise the risk of injury that can result from the stress of two consecutive years of hard training)”.

“All in all, the Committee does not appear to have considered the legal ramifications of a lot of their recommendations. On a positive note though, it is encouraging to see the recommendations at paragraphs 121 and 122 that the government should spend more on sports science research, as that is one area in which we are lagging behind some of our European colleagues and certainly behind the US and Australia”.

In an interesting article, Bond Pearce LLP highlight how a Belgian court confirmed that in certain cases, betting companies can legitimately use player and club images without consent, as the betting public needs appropriate information to make informed betting decisions, and this includes photos of the clubs and players.

The court apparently accepted the betting companies’ argument that in this case, the use of players’ images did not have a predominantly commercial goal, but was an application of the right to information.

The case falls into that difficult area of sports law where the rights of access for organisations providing ‘services’ to the public must be balanced with the wishes of sports governing bodies, and personalities, to protect the value of their rights.

It is a fine line to tread. The World Association of Newspapers is currently in negotiation with the International Rugby Board and the International Cricket Council over media access to the Cricket World Cup and Rugby World Cup, both of which are to be held this year.

Another case which has parallels with both of the above concerned media access to the fourth Ashes Test in Australia. Cricket Australia had threatened to lock out media organisations due to the rebroadcast of moving images from previous tests on the internet. This case is examined by Claude Harran, of Dibbs Abbot Stillman, in the January edition of World Sports Law Report.

The relationship between sport, gambling, sponsorship and advertising will be examined at a World Sports Law Report Briefing, held at the offices of DLA Piper in London on 7 March. Contact Jit Jaswal for more information.

Andy Brown