Litigating and Arbitrating after Diarra and Seraing: What Theory Demands in Practice (Part IV)

Series: Lex Ludica and Lex Sportiva: the autonomous legal order of international sports
Technical level: High — arbitrators, sports lawyers, academics
Suggested citation: Martinez Cartagena, J.M. (2026). "Litigating and Arbitrating after Diarra and Seraing". The Sports Dossier. https://juanmanuelmartinezc.com/en/dossier/litigating-and-arbitrating-after-diarra-and-seraing-what-theory-demands-in-practice-part-iv/

The three previous articles in this series built a doctrinal structure: the distinction between lex ludica and lex sportiva as a hermeneutic tool, the CAS as a silent legislator of a transnational legal order it denies having constructed, and the CJEU as a systematic cartographer of the boundaries of that legal order. The purpose of this fourth and final article is different: to take that structure and translate it into working criteria for anyone who has to litigate or arbitrate within the system — not in the abstract, but in the concrete details of the case file, the hearing, and the award.

The methodological warning with which any practical guide to international sports law in 2026 must begin is the following: the system in which a sports lawyer or arbitrator operates today is not the same as the one that existed before October 4, 2024 — the date of the Diarra ruling — nor is it the same as the one that existed before August 1, 2025 — the date of the Seraing ruling. Both judgments of the CJEU significantly altered the operating conditions of lex sportiva within the European space. Ignoring them in daily practice is not an academically incorrect option; it is a strategic error with immediate procedural consequences.

This article organizes these consequences across five levels: the prior legal characterization of the problem, arguing before CAS in post-Diarra contractual disputes, evaluating the enforceability of sports awards in the European Union post-Seraing, the correct use of the sports specificity argument after Meca-Medina, and managing arbitral precedent in a system that has stare decisis de facto without having formally enshrined it in its code of procedure.

I. The First Step is Not the Argument: It is the Characterization

The most important lesson of this series — and the one with the greatest practical impact — precedes any substantive argument: before building any position, the sports lawyer must determine which of the two regulatory regimes the dispute falls into. The distinction between lex ludica and lex sportiva is not a taxonomic exercise performed at the end of the analysis to classify what has already been decided. It is the starting point that determines the competent tribunal, the applicable standard of review, and the available argumentative horizon.

The operative question is the following: does the rule in question regulate the game as a technical activity, or does it regulate the legal relations generated by sport as an institution? If the answer is the former — it concerns an on-field decision, a scoring rule, a technical evaluation made by sports officials during the competition — the lawyer is dealing with lex ludica. The CAS will admit the appeal — because its abstention is not a matter of jurisdiction but of arbitral self-restraint, as clearly mentioned in the Finnish Ski Association Award ^[1], which established definitively that the CAS panel will declare on the merits that it will not intervene, except in cases of bad faith, arbitrariness, bias, or error of law. There is no substantive argument, no matter how well-crafted, that will change that outcome if the dispute genuinely belongs to lex ludica. Knowing this before filing the appeal is not an academic question: it is the difference between building a position that the tribunal can accept and arriving at the hearing with a strategy that the system itself has institutionally decided not to adopt.

If the answer is the latter — contracts, transfers, disciplinary sanctions, eligibility rules with economic effects, compensation mechanisms — the lawyer is dealing with lex sportiva. The CAS has full de novo review (cognición). Substantive argument has its place. And since Diarra, this space includes the possibility of invoking European law as a limit to applicable federation rules.

A frequent error in litigation practice is constructing CAS appeals by mixing both regimes: alleging in the same brief that the field official erred in the technical evaluation of an infraction and that the disciplinary sanction derived from that evaluation was disproportionate. The first of these arguments belongs to lex ludica and the CAS will not review it. The second belongs to lex sportiva and the CAS can and must review it. Confusing the two levels in a single appeal not only weakens the available argument — that of the second level — but also gives the tribunal the impression that the appellant does not distinguish what the tribunal itself considers a fundamental institutional boundary. Correct characterization is not a formalism. It is the first argument of the case.

II. Before the CAS after Diarra: Article 17 of the RSTP as a Field of Reconstruction

On October 4, 2024, the legal order of professional football woke up with a central rule declared incompatible with European law and without an alternative text in force. The Second Chamber of the CJEU had declared that certain provisions of Article 17 of the RSTP — the automatic joint and several liability of the new club, the sporting sanctions during the dispute period, the prohibition of issuing the ITC (CTI) while the dispute was pending — were contrary to Article 45 TFEU and Article 101 TFEU. FIFA responded swiftly: Circular 1917 ^[2] of December 23, 2024, introduced a provisional regulatory framework effective from January 1, 2025. But a provisional framework is not consolidated law, and cases initiated under the previous regime continue to be processed under the shadow of the ruling.

That situation — rules challenged by the CJEU, a provisional framework that partially reformulates them, and pending files opened under the previous regime — requires a stratified reading of the problem from the litigant. The question is not just what Article 17 of the RSTP says. It is what the CAS can do with that article after Diarra, and what the litigant can do with that response.

The CAS is not a European Union court and has no formal obligation to apply the TFEU as primary law. However, over four decades, the CAS has built a jurisprudence that incorporates general principles of law as part of lex sportiva and the transnational public policy that governs the sports legal order. Proportionality, non-arbitrariness, protection of the athlete's fundamental rights: these principles are not foreign to the CAS — they are constitutive of its own jurisprudence. An argument invoking Diarra before the CAS does not invoke the TFEU directly. It invokes the principle of proportionality and the prohibition of arbitrary restrictions on contractual freedom as general principles of the international sports legal order, the existence of which the CJEU itself has confirmed and the application of which the CAS cannot ignore without contradicting four decades of its own jurisprudence.

The argumentative construction before the CAS in post-Diarra contractual disputes operates in three layers that must be articulated coherently and simultaneously, not as independent subsidiary arguments.

The first layer is the quantification of compensation. The Webster-Matuzalem doctrine — market value of the player, fees paid by the new club, remaining contract time, specific circumstances of the case — remains the interpretative standard of Article 17 of the RSTP. But Diarra adds a control criterion: a quantification that results in compensation so high that it operates in practice as a transfer ban equivalent to the system the CJEU declared incompatible is, by definition, disproportionate. The litigant must demonstrate that the amount claimed — or resisted — is proportional to the objective of protecting contractual stability, not an instrument of absolute deterrence of player mobility.

The second layer is the joint and several liability of the new club. The CJEU did not eliminate this instrument — it accepted it as potentially legitimate if based on proof of actual inducement, not on an automatic presumption. FIFA's provisional framework reflects this distinction. The litigant defending a new club must prove that their client did not induce the player to break the previous contract — which requires building positive proof of the absence of inducement, not simply denying the presumption. The litigant representing the releasing club must prove the opposite with sufficient evidence. In both cases, the argumentative burden has increased compared to the previous regime.

The third layer — and the most novel — is the enforceability of the award as an argument before the CAS itself. This is the immediate practical effect that Seraing introduces into the litigation strategy before the Lausanne tribunal. CAS panels, when drafting their awards, take into consideration the risk that these awards may not be enforceable in the jurisdictions where they must take effect — because an inoperable award is an institutional failure of the arbitral system itself. If the new club is domiciled in a European Union Member State, the argument of incompatibility with Article 45 TFEU is not just a substantive argument: it is an argument about the viability of the award itself. A panel that mechanically applies rules declared incompatible with European public policy by the CJEU, ignoring that pronouncement when invoked by the parties, produces an award that the courts of Member States may refuse to execute. That risk is not hypothetical after Seraing. It is a systemic fact that the lawyer must articulate before the panel with sufficient precision for the arbitrator to see it for what it is: not an argument of last resort, but a condition for the viability of the award being built.

These three layers are inseparable. An argument that only operates on the first layer — quantification — without addressing the second and third is an incomplete argument that ignores what Diarra and Seraing bring to the system. An argument that invokes Seraing without having solidly constructed the two previous layers is a premature argument that the panel will discard before reaching the question of enforceability. The strength of the post-Diarra position before the CAS depends on these three layers being articulated as a unitary argument, not as a checklist of subsidiary points.

III. Enforceability of Sports Awards in the EU after Seraing: The New Risk Map

Before Seraing, the FIFA - CAS - Swiss Federal Tribunal chain produced a result that the legal systems of Member States recognized with relative automaticity: res judicata, enforceability, closure of the litigation. After Seraing, that automaticity no longer exists when the award involves rights that form part of European public policy — the fundamental freedoms of the Treaty, competition law, effective judicial protection guaranteed by Article 47 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights — and no Member State court with preliminary ruling capacity has been able to verify that compatibility. The risk map for the litigant has been reconfigured in both directions — for those enforcing and those resisting — and understanding this reconfiguration with precision is as important as understanding the ruling itself.

It is useful to place the Seraing case in its broader jurisprudential context. It was not the first scenario in which the enforceability of CAS awards was questioned in the European space. The European Court of Human Rights, in Mutu and Pechstein v. Switzerland ^[3] (judgment of October 2, 2018, applications nos. 40575/10 and 67474/10), recognized the CAS as an independent arbitral tribunal within the meaning of Article 6.1 of the ECHR, but stressed the need to reinforce its procedural guarantees — in particular the right to a public hearing, which it deemed violated in Pechstein's case — and established a distinction that Seraing will adopt: in forced arbitration, unlike voluntary arbitration, the guarantees of Article 6 of the Convention apply directly to the arbitral proceedings because the party has not freely waived their right. For its part, the CJEU had established in Eco Swiss v. Benetton (C-126/97, 1999) ^[4] the principle that Member State courts must be able to control the compatibility of arbitral awards with European public policy before enforcing them. In this context, the Seraing litigation does not introduce this principle out of nowhere, but projects it with particular intensity onto international sports arbitration, reopening the debate on the sufficiency of the control exercised by the Swiss Federal Tribunal and the articulation between the autonomy of the sports system and the requirements of European public policy. Its relevance lies, therefore, not in the creation of the principle, but in its reconfiguration within a context of compulsory and highly institutionalized arbitration such as that of the CAS.

The global relevance of this jurisprudential line does not lie in its European origin, but in its capacity to condition the operation of an arbitral system that presents itself as universal. To the extent that the CAS acts as the final instance in disputes involving global actors, economic rights, and markets, any requirement regarding due process or public policy control in key jurisdictions has a radiating effect over the entire sports ecosystem. In this sense, Seraing should not be understood as a starting point, but as an inflection point: the moment when principles developed in commercial arbitration and in the protection of fundamental rights begin to project directly onto the institutional structure of international sport.

The first thing the litigant needs to determine is whether the specific award falls within the material scope of the Seraing principle. The CJEU was explicit that compulsory sports arbitration before the CAS is legitimate in principle and that its awards are not invalid under European law. Seraing operates specifically when the award involves rights that Union law protects as part of its public policy. An award on an anti-doping sanction, on the technical eligibility of an athlete, on a competition qualification dispute, or on a disciplinary matter without a cross-border economic dimension — such an award does not activate the Seraing principle. An award on contractual liability for breach of a transfer contract between parties domiciled in different Member States, on restrictions on hiring players with effects on the European labor market, or on rules limiting the free movement of sports workers — such an award falls squarely within the scope of the principle. The distinction is not always sharp, and there will be borderline cases that national courts must resolve. But the demarcation criterion is clear: the European public policy dimension of the subject matter of the dispute, not the sporting nature of the tribunal that resolved it.

The second thing the litigant needs to understand is what control Seraing demands and what it does not. The ruling does not establish that a Member State court must review the merits of the award de novo — it is not a second instance on the merits of the sports dispute. It establishes that a compatibility review with European public policy must be possible: verifying that the outcome of the award does not violate provisions and principles of Union law that have that status. The difference between a review on the merits and a public policy control is procedurally significant: the national court does not ask whether the CAS correctly decided the sports dispute. It asks whether the result of that decision is compatible with the rights that the European legal order guarantees to the parties.

That distinction has concrete strategic consequences for both sides of the litigation.

For those enforcing a favorable award in a Member State, Seraing introduces an obligation of anticipation that did not exist with the same clarity before. If the award touches upon rules or principles relevant to European public policy, the enforcing party must assume that the debtor will attempt to invoke Seraing to challenge recognition before local courts. Proper preparation does not begin in the national court: it begins in the procedural strategy before the CAS. An award that addressed European law arguments, recorded that the panel considered the compatibility of the applied rules with European public policy, and reasoned its result from that perspective is an award more resistant to a post-Seraing challenge. The work of shielding the award begins at the arbitration hearing, not in the enforcement proceeding.

For those resisting the enforcement of an unfavorable award in a Member State, Seraing provides an instrument that the system did not offer with the same clarity before August 1, 2025. The possibility of arguing before national courts that the award cannot produce a res judicata effect because no court authorized to make preliminary references to the CJEU has verified its compatibility with European public policy is now a systemic fact, not a speculative argumentative construction. That argument is not equivalent to reopening the merits of the sports dispute — national courts will reject it if presented in those terms — but it can obtain a control that allows the affected party to invoke the rights that European law confers on them and which the award could not or would not consider.

The warning with which this section must close is equally important: Seraing is not a master key to challenge any sports award before national European courts. The CJEU was explicit that the legitimacy of compulsory sports arbitration is maintained and that the compatibility control with European public policy is not a full review on the merits. A lawyer who uses Seraing as a purely dilatory tool in disputes that do not genuinely involve European public policy rights will find that national courts quickly distinguish between the principle and its abuse — and that this abuse can have consequences in costs and procedural credibility. Seraing expanded the available instruments. It did not turn them into arguments for universal use.

V. The Arbitral Precedent as a Tool and as a Risk: Managing CAS Case Law

The previous article in this series documented the paradox of precedent at the CAS: the tribunal has stare decisis de facto without having formally enshrined it in its code of procedure. Understanding the concrete mechanics of this phenomenon — who produces the awards, how those who write them are appointed, how they cite each other, and what all this implies for those who litigate — is indispensable to turn this paradox into a working tool.

The Appointment Architecture: Two Logics, One Community

The CAS operates with a closed list of more than 500 arbitrators and mediators from nearly 100 countries, appointed by ICAS for renewable four-year terms. Only those on this list can arbitrate cases. In the field of football, the CAS also manages a separate Football List of 200 arbitrators — appointed by ICAS based on proposals from the confederations, the ECA, the WLF, FIFPRO, and FIFA — which concentrates the cases with the highest volume and regulatory impact in the system.

This design produces appointment consequences that the CAS Code regulates differently depending on the division and the arbitrator's role on the panel. The distinction is relevant to the litigant because it determines how much control they have over the composition of the tribunal that will decide their case.

In the Ordinary Division — which hears disputes in first and sole instance, typically contractual disputes between parties who submit their controversy directly to the CAS — the party-appointed arbitrators jointly choose the president of the panel within the time limit set by the Court Office. Only in the absence of agreement between them does the President of the Division intervene to appoint them (Article R40.2 ^[5] of the Code). In this context, the parties have real participation in the complete integration of the panel.

In the Appeals Division — which, according to CAS statistics cited by various sources specialized in arbitration law, concentrates the vast majority of the tribunal's total cases, including transfer disputes, doping, and disciplinary sanctions that constitute the core of international sports litigation — the mechanics are structurally different. Each party appoints its arbitrator from the closed list. However, the president of the panel is appointed directly by the President of the Appeals Arbitration Division "after the appointment of the arbitrator by the respondent and after consultation with the arbitrators" (Article R54 ^[6]). The parties do not participate in this appointment nor can they anticipate it.

Article R54 establishes the criteria that the Division President must take into account when appointing panel presidents: experience, availability, diversity, equality, and rotation among arbitrators. These criteria exist in the normative text — and their existence is relevant because it shows that the system is not arbitrary in its formal design. What does not exist is the concrete methodology of their application or a verification mechanism accessible to the parties. The parties cannot know in advance which arbitrators are available at any given time, what relative weight is assigned to each criterion in a specific case, or how frequently each arbitrator has been appointed as a panel president in previous panels. What the Code enshrines as a discretionary power guided by general criteria, practice converts into a decision of which litigants only know the result — the composition of the panel — but not the reasoning that produced it. Antoine Duval ^[7] pointed out this dimension when calling for CAS reform: the President of the Appeals Division decides who presides over each specific panel and can, therefore, tip the scales in one direction or another, without the parties having instruments to verify whether the criteria of R54 were correctly applied in their case.

Empirical Concentration: More Than 500 on Paper, Many Fewer in Practice

What empirical studies on CAS case law reveal is that this formal concentration in a closed list produces an even greater real concentration in practice. The most exhaustive study on this architecture — "CAS Arbitrators and Their Relationships", published by Springer in the collective work on the CAS edited by Johan Lindholm ^[8] and collaborators — analyzes the complete corpus of published awards and documents that the arbitrators with the highest number of appointments constitute a small, recurring group, while the 98 arbitrators with the lowest number of appointments in the studied corpus collectively account for only 130 total appearances — fewer than those accumulated individually by a single arbitrator from the central group. The system has more than 500 arbitrators on paper and an appointment practice that concentrates a disproportionate fraction of cases in a significantly smaller group.

This concentration does not per se equate to an irregularity. The Swiss Federal Tribunal has expressly recognized that the closed list inevitably generates a community among sports lawyers and CAS arbitrators, with prior relationships that cannot be automatically assumed as conflicts of interest. The IBA Guidelines on Conflicts of Interest expressly mention sports arbitration as an example of a specialized procedure that may be exempt from the general rule limiting repeated appointments. But this concentration does have practical consequences that the litigant cannot ignore: the probability that a panel member has participated in building the relevant case law for the specific case is considerably higher at the CAS than in any other arbitral forum of equivalent scope. And this prior participation — which is simultaneously an argument in favor of the system's coherence and a risk factor for those litigating against that case law — defines the actual horizon of practice before the tribunal.

From Formal Stare Decisis to Real Stare Decisis

Upon this epistemic community operates the phenomenon of precedent that Kaufmann-Kohler ^[9] documented in 2007: before 2003, only one in six CAS awards cited prior cases; after 2003, practically all of them do. The jump was not just statistical. It was the moment the system consciously assumed it was building a jurisprudential corpus, not simply resolving isolated disputes. The award IAAF v. USA Track & Field and Jerome Young (CAS 2004/A/628, §19) ^[10] formulated it from within with the clarity of someone describing an established fact:

"As has been demonstrated, much of the debate before the Panel revolved around the effect of the First CAS Decision. The Panel had to examine in detail both the issues raised before the First CAS Panel and the terms of that Decision. In CAS jurisprudence, there is no principle of binding precedent, or stare decisis. However, a CAS Panel will seek, if the evidence permits, to reach the same legal conclusion as a previous Panel. Whether this is regarded as a matter of international comity or an attempt to build a coherent legal corpus is irrelevant."

For the parties, the distinction does matter. What the panel described as indifferent — whether the reason is collegial deference or the construction of a corpus — is precisely what determines whether the precedent operates as persuasive authority or as applicable law. Kaufmann-Kohler concluded that the effects are those of a binding precedent, regardless of the reason that produces them. And a small, recurring epistemic community, which builds on its own awards across decades, is the structural condition that makes those effects possible.

Strategic Consequences: Three Levels That Are Not Optional

The first consequence is that case law research before the CAS is not optional. A lawyer who files an appeal without knowing the relevant line of awards on the point in question is not prepared for the tribunal they are addressing. The CAS expects parties to know its case law, cite it when it favors them, and distinguish it when it prejudices them. A panel made up of arbitrators who have participated in building that case law receives ignorance of a relevant award as an argumentative weakness. Silence on unfavorable case law does not go unnoticed before a tribunal that knows it because it helped build it.

The second consequence is the technique of distinguishing. When consolidated case law runs contrary to the client's position, the lawyer has two options: to frontally attack the precedent — which requires weighty arguments to convince the panel that the line of case law should be revised — or to distinguish the facts of the specific case from those that produced the precedent. Distinguishing is the usual technical tool: the general rule is accepted, but it is argued that the facts of the case are materially different in an aspect that justifies a different outcome. A well-constructed distinction is more persuasive than a frontal attack on consolidated case law, which CAS panels receive with structural skepticism. An arbitrator who is asked to abandon a criterion he himself helped establish needs weighty substantive reasons, not rhetoric.

The third consequence — and the most relevant in the post-Diarra context — is managing the conflict between consolidated CAS case law and CJEU jurisprudence. The Webster-Matuzalem doctrine on the calculation of compensation for breach of Article 17 of the RSTP is consolidated CAS jurisprudence, built by successive panels that cited each other and sedimented a standard that any arbitrator in the system knows today. Diarra introduced a questioning of the regulatory framework on which that case law operates. When those two lines clash in a specific case, the lawyer cannot simply cite one and ignore the other. They must build a position that explains how the panel should articulate both: if Diarra questions the instruments but does not eliminate the principle of contractual stability, and if the Matuzalem formula is compatible with a proportionality-respectful reading of the RSTP, the available position is that CAS case law remains applicable but must be interpreted in light of the limits that Diarra draws. This position is stronger — and more honest — than pretending that Diarra does not exist or that Matuzalem does not matter. And it is the only position that a panel familiar with both lines will take seriously.

VI. Series Closure: Conditioned Functional Autonomy as a Starting Point, Not an Excuse

This series began with a paradox: the system that resolves disputes of millions of dollars declares itself incompetent to review whether a goal was valid or not. It ends with another: the legal order that built its rules in the vacuum that States did not fill must now ensure that those rules are compatible with the States that tolerate them. Both paradoxes are consequences of the same phenomenon — lex sportiva as a legal order of conditioned functional autonomy — and both are, in practice, opportunities for well-performed work.

Conditioned functional autonomy is not a defect of the system nor an argument to delegitimize it. It is the precise description of how any private legal order of transnational scope works in a world organized into state sovereignties. Lex mercatoria, international trade law, investment arbitration: all operate under structurally analogous conditions — real autonomy, ultimate dependence on state recognition for coercive effectiveness. What distinguishes lex sportiva is that its conditioning factors are now more explicit, more detailed, and more demanding than those of any other private transnational legal order, because the CJEU has handed down a handful of structuring rulings over thirty years — Bosman, Meca-Medina, Diarra, Seraing — with increasingly profound consequences for the regulatory space of organized sport.

What this condition demands of the legal operator — arbitrator or litigant — is not that they lament the limits, but that they know them with sufficient precision to work within them effectively. Knowing the distinction between lex ludica and lex sportiva before constructing the first argument. Knowing the Matuzalem formula and its tension with Diarra before quantifying a claim. Knowing the Seraing principle before evaluating the enforceability of an award. Knowing the Meca-Medina proportionality test before invoking the specificity of sport. Knowing the CAS appointment architecture before building a panel selection strategy. These are not luxury skills reserved for the system's most sophisticated specialists. They are the minimum threshold of technical competence that the system demands today.

Series 2 of The Sports Dossier has attempted to build this foundation with rigor and without simplification. Lex ludica protects the integrity of the game from permanent juridification. Lex sportiva is the living law of institutionalized sport, built award by award by a tribunal that says it does not legislate and has been doing so for four decades. The CJEU has mapped the limits of that law with precision. And the lawyer or arbitrator who enters that system without knowing that cartography is not operating in international sports law. They are operating in a previous version of it that no longer exists.

Reference Case Law of the Series

CAS, Ad hoc Division, Segura v. IAAF, Olympic Games Sydney, 2000 (§17)
CAS 2004/A/704, Yang Tae Young & KOC v. FIG, award of October 21, 2004
CAS 2016/A/4643, HSI & Cian O'Connor v. FEI, award of August 3, 2016
CAS 94/129, USA Shooting & Q. v. Union Internationale de Tir (UIT), award of May 23, 1995
CAS 98/214, B. v. Fédération Internationale de Judo (FIJ), award of March 17, 1999
CAS 2004/A/628, IAAF v. USA Track & Field and Jerome Young, award of June 28, 2004
Swiss Federal Tribunal, judgment of March 15, 1993, Gundel v. FEI
Swiss Federal Tribunal, judgment of May 27, 2003, Lazutina & Danilova
Swiss Federal Tribunal, ATF 134 III 193 (5C.248/2006)
ECtHR, Salabiaku v. France, judgment of October 7, 1988, application no. 10519/83
CJEU, C-126/97, Eco Swiss v. Benetton, judgment of June 1, 1999
CJEU, C-333/21, European Superleague Company SL v. FIFA and UEFA, judgment of December 21, 2023
CAS 2016/A/4490, RFC Seraing v. FIFA, award of March 9, 2017
Swiss Federal Tribunal, judgment of February 20, 2018, 4A_260/2017
ECtHR, Mutu and Pechstein v. Switzerland, judgment of October 2, 2018, applications nos. 40575/10 and 67474/10

Reference Doctrine of the Series

Reeb, M. (ed.) (2002). Digest of CAS Awards II, 1998–2000. Kluwer Law International.
Lindholm, J. and collaborators. "CAS Arbitrators and Their Relationships", in The Court of Arbitration for Sport and Its Jurisprudence. Springer.
Rigozzi, A.; Hasler, E. (2023). "International Sports Law and CAS Arbitration: Independence and Impartiality", in Cordero-Moss, G. (ed.), Independence and Impartiality of International Adjudicators. Cambridge University Press — cited in Article 4.
Duval, A. (2015) — "Three Pillars for a Reform of CAS" (Play the Game).

CAS 2011/A/2671, Finnish Ski Association & Saarinen v. FIS, award of June 6, 2011, §38. ↩︎
FIFA, Circular 1917, dated December 23, 2024 — provisional regulatory framework post-Diarra, in force from January 1, 2025. ↩︎
ECtHR, Mutu and Pechstein v. Switzerland, judgment of October 2, 2018, applications nos. 40575/10 and 67474/10. ↩︎
CJEU, Judgment of June 1, 1999, Case C-126/97, Eco Swiss China Time Ltd v. Benetton International NV. ECLI:EU:C:1999:269. ↩︎
CAS Code of Sports-related Arbitration, Article R40.2 (Ordinary Division). ↩︎
Ibid, Article R54 (Appeals Division). ↩︎
Duval, A. (2015). ‘Three Pillars for a Reform of CAS’. Play the Game. Available at: playthegame.org. ↩︎
Lindholm, J. and collaborators. ‘CAS Arbitrators and Their Relationships’, in The Court of Arbitration for Sport and Its Jurisprudence. Springer. ↩︎
Kaufmann-Kohler, G. (2007). ‘Arbitral Precedent: Dream, Necessity or Excuse? The 2006 Freshfields Lecture’. Arbitration International, vol. 23, no. 3, pp. 357–378. ↩︎
CAS 2004/A/628, IAAF v. USA Track & Field and Jerome Young, award of June 28, 2004, §19. ↩︎