The autonomy that was never absolute: Bosman, Meca-Medina, Diarra, and Seraing as the cartography of a limit (Part III)

Series: Lex Ludica and Lex Sportiva: the autonomous legal order of international sport
Technical level: High — arbitrators, sports lawyers, academics
Suggested citation: Martinez Cartagena, J.M. (2026). "The autonomy that was never absolute". The Sports Dossier. juanmanuelmartinezc.com/dossier/

There is a thesis in the discourse of the international sports movement that is repeated with the frequency and confidence of someone invoking a principle of natural law: sport has its own specificity that distinguishes it from any ordinary economic activity, and this specificity justifies a degree of regulatory autonomy that national legal systems must respect. The thesis has a real basis—sport is not simply a market—but it has been invoked for decades with a generosity that European law has been cutting back, case by case, with a precision that no longer tolerates ambiguity.

The previous articles in this series established the two structural categories of the sports legal order—lex ludica and lex sportiva—and documented how the CAS constructed the latter through four decades of accumulated jurisprudence. This third article examines the limit of that construction: the point where the functional autonomy of lex sportiva collides with the legal order of the European Union and is redefined by it.

The thesis of this article is as follows: the Bosman (1995) - Meca-Medina (2006) - Diarra (2024) - Seraing (2025) axis is not a sequence of external attacks on the autonomy of sport. It is the systematic and progressive cartography of the limits within which that autonomy can operate. Each of these four interventions of the Court of Justice of the European Union delineated with greater precision the regulatory space of lex sportiva. And after Seraing, that space is known with a precision it lacked at any previous moment. Lex sportiva survives—no ruling has eliminated the sports legal order—but as a legal order of conditioned, not absolute, autonomy. That condition always existed. Now it is mapped out.

I. The starting point: the specificity of sport as an argument and as a shield

The notion of the specificity of sport is legally hybrid. It has a genuine descriptive component—sports organizations are not ordinary businesses, competition requires rivals, results have a social value that transcends market price—and an argumentative component that federations have systematically used to claim immunity from competition law, labor law, and the fundamental freedoms of the Treaty. Both components are real. The confusion between them—treating the argument as if it were the description—is the error that European jurisprudence has been correcting case by case since 1995.

The Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union incorporated for the first time an express competence in the field of sport with the entry into force of the Treaty of Lisbon on December 1, 2009. Article 165^[1] provides that the Union shall contribute to the promotion of European sporting issues, while taking into account the specific characteristics of sport, its structures based on voluntary activity and its social and educational function. Two clarifications are essential to understand the legal scope of this provision. First, the Treaty does not use the expression "specificity of sport"—that is a doctrinal and jurisprudential construct, not a textual one. What the article recognizes are "specific characteristics", a deliberately more modest formulation. Second, the competence conferred on the Union is supporting and coordinating—the article itself expressly excludes any harmonization of the laws and regulations of the Member States. The recognition in Article 165 is, therefore, not an exemption from European law applicable to sport. It is an invitation to balance interests within the limits of that same law. And the jurisprudence of the CJEU has constructed, judgment by judgment, the precise criteria for this balancing.

What the four rulings analyzed in this article have in common is not the outcome—each reaches different conclusions on different rules—but the methodology: none rejects the specificity of sport as a valid argument; all subject it to the scrutiny of the Treaty and require it to pass, if applicable, the proportionality test. The difference between these two operations is what Meca-Medina illustrates most clearly: the CJEU accepted that the challenged anti-doping rules were compatible with European competition law, but rejected that their sporting nature exempted them a priori from such scrutiny. The specificity of sport is a possible justification, not an automatic immunity. This principle was established by Bosman in 1995, and no subsequent ruling has abandoned it—including Seraing, which in August 2025 extended it to a different and more radical level: no longer the content of sports regulations, but the procedural architecture through which they are imposed and executed.

II. Bosman (1995): the first limit and its structural logic

On December 15, 1995, the Court of Justice of the European Communities delivered its judgment in the case Union Royale Belge des Sociétés de Football Association ASBL and others v. Jean-Marc Bosman (C-415/93)^[2]. A detail frequently omitted by commentators: FIFA was not a party to the proceedings. The disputes arose between Jean-Marc Bosman, the Belgian national federation (URBSFA), Royal Club Liégeois, and UEFA—in three joined cases referred to the ECJ by the Cour d'appel of Liège for a preliminary ruling. The challenged regulations were those of the URBSFA and UEFA, which at that time substantially replicated the transfer system established by FIFA in its 1994 regulations.

The ECJ declared two types of rules of the system then in force to be incompatible with Article 48 of the Treaty of the European Community—renumbered as Article 45 TFEU following the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty in 2009. First: the clauses requiring the payment of a financial transfer fee to the releasing club in order for a player whose employment contract had expired to be signed by a new club. Second: the nationality clauses limiting the number of national players of other Member States that a club could field in European competitions. The Court's central argument was of a simplicity that proved devastating: Jean-Marc Bosman was a community worker who wished to pursue his activity in another Member State—the Dunkerque club had made a concrete offer that the transfer fee system rendered unviable—and the regulations created a real and concrete obstacle to that exercise. Furthermore, a rule produced by a private-law association can constitute a restriction on the fundamental freedoms of the Treaty with the same efficacy as a state rule if its effect on those freedoms is equivalent. The private nature of the rule-maker is not a shield against the Treaty.

What Bosman established as a precedent was not merely the elimination of those specific clauses in the European context. It was the consecration of a principle of general scope: rules produced by private sports organizations are not immune to the scrutiny of EU law, neither because they are private rules nor because they regulate a sporting activity. Professional sport is an economic activity. The regulations governing it are subject to the same law that governs any other economic activity, unless there is a demonstrated, sufficient, and proportional justification.

The impact did not stop at the borders of the European Union. Although the ruling was only directly applicable within the Community area, its logic had a global reach: FIFA administered a transfer system substantially identical to the one the ECJ had declared incompatible with the fundamental freedoms of the Treaty. Regulatory adaptation was inevitable. The RSTP resulting from that process incorporated two mechanisms that the system retains to this day: training compensation, which rewards clubs that participated in the player's development between the ages of 12 and 21 when the player signs their first professional contract or is transferred before the age of 23, and the solidarity contribution, which distributes a percentage of the value of each international transfer among training clubs. Both mechanisms are, in reality, FIFA's regulatory response to Bosman: a way to preserve a financial incentive for training within the limits delineated by the ruling.

The impact also extended to Latin American systems. In countries that produce footballing talent, such as Argentina, Brazil, or Colombia, the pre-existing transfer system featured ties that entailed high costs for clubs when releasing players abroad. The logic of Bosman—contractual freedom upon expiration of the contract as a right of the athlete-worker—gradually permeated national legal systems and the practices of global market agents at varying speeds and through different adaptations, precisely because FIFA's RSTP—the regulation serving as a benchmark for all affiliated national federations—had to be reformulated in light of the ruling.

The reaction of the sports movement was one of adjustment and adaptation, not intellectual surrender. The ruling was accepted in its immediate consequences—the elimination of transfer fees and nationality clauses in the European context—but its broader scope remained without a clear answer: did the logic of Bosman extend to any federative rule that could affect fundamental freedoms of the Treaty, or was there a category of purely sporting rules that remained outside such scrutiny? This was not a theoretical question. In the following years, the European Commission tended to treat strictly sporting matters with regulatory caution, implicitly suggesting that such a distinction existed. The Court of First Instance explicitly consecrated it in 2004 when ruling on the Meca-Medina case at first instance, declaring that anti-doping rules were purely sporting and therefore immune to competition law. The CJEU reversed this reasoning in July 2006 and established that no sporting rule is exempt from Treaty scrutiny by its sole nature. This is the difference that defines all subsequent European sports law.

III. Meca-Medina (2006): the end of sectorial immunity

The case that would lead the CJEU to definitively reformulate the relationship between European law and sports regulations had a procedural origin that is worth reconstructing from the judgment itself, because the chain of instances is as revealing as the final ruling.

On January 31, 1999, during the FINA Open Water Swimming World Cup in Salvador de Bahía^[3]—in which they had finished first and second respectively—David Meca-Medina and Igor Majcen tested positive for nandrolone. On August 8, 1999, the FINA Doping Panel^[4] imposed a four-year suspension. Both appealed to the CAS, which on February 29, 2000, upheld the sanction. Following the emergence of new scientific evidence regarding the endogenous production of nandrolone through the consumption of certain foods, the parties agreed to resubmit the case to the CAS, which on May 23, 2001, reduced the suspension to two years. The appellants did not challenge this second award before the Swiss Federal Tribunal. One week later—on May 30, 2001—they filed a complaint with the European Commission against the International Olympic Committee (IOC), whose anti-doping rules FINA applied, alleging incompatibility with Articles 81 and 82 EC on competition and with Article 49 EC on the free provision of services. Specifically, they challenged the scientific basis of the 2 ng/ml tolerance threshold for nandrolone, the strict liability system, and the independence of arbitration bodies from the IOC.

On August 1, 2002, the Commission rejected the complaint—after examining the regulations under competition law—concluding that they did not fall within the prohibition of Articles 81 and 82 EC. The Court of First Instance confirmed this in its judgment of September 30, 2004 (T-313/02)^[5], reasoning that the ban on doping is based on purely sporting considerations, alien to any economic consideration, and that for this reason anti-doping regulations did not fall within the scope of Articles 39, 49, 81, and 82 EC. It added that if a purely sporting regulation is alien to economic activity and does not fall within Articles 39 and 49 EC, this circumstance means it is also alien to economic competition relations and is excluded from the scope of Articles 81 and 82 EC. Advocate General Léger^[6], in his opinion of March 23, 2006, likewise recommended the rejection of the appeal in its entirety.

On July 18, 2006, the CJEU set aside the judgment of the CFI. The basis for this reversal is found in paragraphs 27 and 28 of the judgment, which contain the two most important propositions of the ruling:

27. It is apparent from all those considerations that the mere fact that a rule is of a purely sporting nature does not have the effect of removing from the scope of the Treaty the person engaging in the activity governed by that rule or the body which has laid it down.

28. If the sporting activity in question falls within the scope of the Treaty, the conditions for engaging in it are then subject to all the obligations which result from the various provisions of the Treaty. It follows that the rules which govern that activity must satisfy the requirements of those provisions, which, in particular, seek to ensure freedom of movement for workers, freedom of establishment, freedom to provide services or competition.
CJEU, Judgment of 18 July 2006, Case C-519/04 P, David Meca-Medina and Igor Majcen v. European Commission, §27 and §28.^[7]

The CFI's error of law was precise: it had considered that a purely sporting regulation could be totally excluded from the scope of Articles 81 and 82 EC for the sole reason of being classified as purely sporting in relation to Articles 39 and 49 EC, without any need to verify whether it met the specific application requirements of competition law. The CJEU established that such automaticity does not exist: free movement and competition are autonomous Treaty regimes with their own application requirements, and the conclusion reached under one does not predetermine the one to be reached under the other.

However—and this is what makes Meca-Medina a more complex ruling than its usual reception suggests—the CJEU did not conclude that the challenged anti-doping rules were contrary to the Treaty. It set aside the CFI's judgment to examine those rules under the correct methodology, and upon examining them with that methodology, declared them compatible with competition law.

The instrument for this examination was set by paragraph 42, borrowing it from the Wouters judgment (C-309/99)^[8]: the compatibility of a regulation with competition law cannot be assessed in the abstract. It must be analyzed in the overall context in which it was adopted, the objectives it pursues, and whether the restrictive effects it produces are inherent to and proportionate to those objectives. Applying this test, the CJEU considered that the anti-doping regulations pursued a legitimate objective—ensuring equal opportunities for athletes, the integrity of competition, and the ethical values of sport—and that the appellants had not demonstrated that the conditions set to determine doping situations subject to sanction lacked sufficient scientific justification, nor that the sanctions imposed were disproportionate. The appeal was dismissed. The plaintiffs lost the case.

But the sports movement lost the argument. And this asymmetry is the key to Meca-Medina: the outcome was favorable to the federations; the reasoning was not. The category of purely sporting rules as a zone of automatic immunity from the Treaty was definitively rejected. Since 2006, the question that cannot be avoided is whether the restrictions imposed by a sporting rule are proportionate to the legitimate objective it pursues—whether under competition law or under the fundamental freedoms of movement. The sporting nature of the rule does not determine the answer to that question. It only determines that the question must be asked.

This is the question that Diarra answered in 2024 regarding FIFA's transfer system—this time under Article 45 TFEU on the free movement of workers: the objective pursued by FIFA, contractual stability, is legitimate; the instruments chosen to protect it are disproportionate. The methodology is exactly the one consecrated by Meca-Medina. What changed in eighteen years was the answer, not the question.

The institutional reaction, at that historic moment, was articulated and immediate. Gianni Infantino^[9], then Director of UEFA's Legal Services Division, published an analysis titled "Meca-Medina: a step backwards for the European sports model and the specificity of sport?" in which he criticized the method, not the outcome. His central argument was that the proportionality test is a subjective and uncertain instrument that opens up any sporting rule—disciplinary measures, licensing systems, eligibility criteria—to Treaty scrutiny, de facto shifting the regulatory functions of sports bodies to the European Commission and the Luxembourg courts. What Infantino did not contest was the underlying principle: that professional sport is an economic activity subject to the Treaty. What he disputed was whether the instrument chosen to administer this scrutiny was correct. That discussion remains open. But the principle established by Meca-Medina is firm—and Diarra confirmed it.

IV. Diarra (2024): when the RSTP collided with Article 45 TFEU

Eighteen years elapsed between Meca-Medina (2006) and Diarra (2024), during which FIFA's transfer system operated—with adjustments, with the Webster-Matuzalem case law analyzed in the previous article in this series, and with growing regulatory tensions—without any supranational body declaring its central provisions incompatible with European law. The Diarra judgment ended this relative stability.

The facts are as follows. In August 2013, Lassana Diarra signed a four-year contract with a Russian professional football club. In 2014, the club terminated the contract alleging breach and filed a claim for 20 million euros with FIFA's Dispute Resolution Chamber (DRC) for termination without just cause. The DRC ordered the player to pay 10.5 million euros; the CAS upheld this decision in 2016. What turned the case into a matter of systemic scope was what happened next: a Belgian club offered a contract to the player but was unable to finalize it because the RSTP established the automatic joint and several liability of the new club for the player's outstanding debt to the former club, and prohibited the issuance of the International Transfer Certificate (ITC) as long as a dispute was pending. The player sued FIFA and the Royal Belgian Football Association before the Belgian courts. The Mons Court of Appeal referred the preliminary questions to the CJEU in September 2022. The Hainaut Commercial Court, at first instance, had already ordered the two associations to pay a provisional amount.

On October 4, 2024, the Second Chamber of the CJEU delivered its judgment in Case C-650/22,^[10] FIFA v. BZ. Three provisions of the RSTP were challenged: the automatic joint and several liability of the new club under Article 17.2, the sporting sanctions during the dispute period provided for in Article 17.4, and the ban on issuing the ITC while the dispute was pending under Article 9 and Annex 3. The Court examined them successively under Article 45 TFEU on the free movement of workers and under Article 101 TFEU on the prohibition of restrictive agreements on competition.

Under Article 45 TFEU, the Court declared the existence of an obstacle to free movement: the combination of these rules placed significant legal risks, unpredictable and potentially very high financial risks, and considerable sporting risks on clubs wishing to sign the player, which, considered together, could deter them from recruiting him. It recognized that the objective of ensuring the regularity of competitions through a certain stability in rosters is legitimate—and this point is important so as not to distort the scope of the ruling. What it declared incompatible with the Treaty was not the principle of contractual stability, but the specific instruments chosen to protect it: the criteria for calculating compensation seemed designed to protect the financial interests of clubs rather than to ensure the smooth running of competitions; joint and several liability operated in principle without taking into account individual circumstances or the actual behavior of the new club; the sporting sanction was imposed almost automatically on the basis of a presumption of liability; and the ITC ban was general, regardless of the circumstances of the termination. Consequently, it declared that Article 45 TFEU precludes these rules unless it is demonstrated that, as they have been interpreted and applied within the territory of the Union, they do not go beyond what is necessary to achieve the objective of ensuring the regularity of competitions.

Under Article 101 TFEU, the Court was more direct: it declared that the rules constitute a restriction of competition by object—the most serious category, which does not require proving concrete effects—by restricting, in a generalized, drastic, and permanent manner, the cross-border competition that clubs could exert in the unilateral signing of players already under contract or players whose contracts had allegedly been terminated without just cause. The exemption under Article 101(3) TFEU remained open conditionally, but the Court noted that the combination of discretionary and disproportionate elements in the rules makes it difficult to consider the requirement of indispensability as satisfied.

It is worth being precise about what the CJEU did not say, because the reception of the ruling was frequently imprecise in both directions. The Court did not eliminate the joint and several liability of the new club—it accepted that it can be a legitimate instrument if based on conclusive proof of actual inducement, not on an automatic presumption. It did not declare contractual stability illegitimate as an objective—it expressly recognized it. It did not annul the RSTP in its entirety—it circumscribed the ruling to the specific provisions challenged. FIFA responded by implementing a provisional framework through Circular 1917^[11] of December 23, 2024, effective from January 1, 2025, which reformulated precisely these points: the burden of proof regarding the joint and several liability of the new club, the ITC procedure, and the criteria for calculating compensation.

There is a dimension of the ruling that standard analyses omit and which has direct doctrinal relevance: the CJEU expressly rejected that FIFA can justify the challenged rules by invoking the protection of workers, because that function has not been delegated to it by public authorities. This clarification opens up a paradox made visible by FIFPRO's^[12] reaction. The organization representing professional players celebrated the ruling, pointed out that the rules had deterred numerous footballers from seeking new employment opportunities, and announced its willingness to negotiate new rules with FIFA and other social partners. What FIFPRO did not mention—neither in its October 2024 press release nor in its May 2025 explanation—is that Article 17 of the RSTP, including the joint and several liability provisions challenged by the CJEU, was the result of a multilateral negotiation process in which FIFPRO itself was an active party. The 2001 RSTP arose from an agreement between FIFA, UEFA, the European Commission, and FIFPRO, reached in March 2001 as a response to Bosman. That agreement, according to the available historical documentation, identified Article 17—the consequences of termination without just cause—as the most important point negotiated between FIFPRO and FIFA. The rules declared disproportionate by the CJEU in 2024 were not a unilateral imposition: they were a multilateral compromise. This origin does not excuse the proportionality issues identified by the Court—those issues exist regardless of who negotiated the rules—but it does complicate the victimhood narrative that FIFPRO constructed after the ruling, and raises an uncomfortable question about shared responsibility in the design of a system that European scrutiny itself declared defective.

Diarra is, in this sense, the Bosman of contractual stability, and that is not in dispute. Just as Bosman in 1995 redrew the transfer market by declaring transfer fees for out-of-contract players incompatible, Diarra in 2024 redraws that same market by declaring disproportionate the mechanisms that this same system had built twenty-three years earlier—in response to Bosman—to protect contractual stability. In both cases, the CJEU does not say that the objective is illegitimate. It says that the instruments are disproportionate. The cycle between regulation, European scrutiny, and regulatory reform is not linear: it is recurrent.

V. Seraing (2025): when the problem is no longer the rules but the system that imposes them

If Diarra attacked the content of lex sportiva—specific provisions of the RSTP—the Seraing judgment raised a challenge of a different and, in a sense, more radical nature: that of the procedural architecture through which lex sportiva is imposed and executed. And it did so through a case that has a structural particularity omitted by standard analyses: the CAS had already examined European law in its award and had declared the challenged rules proportionate.

The facts of the case begin on January 30, 2015. RFC Seraing^[13]—a Belgian club then in the third tier of national football—entered into a "Cooperation Agreement" with Doyen Sports Investment Ltd., a Maltese investment company, which transferred 30% of the economic rights of three players to Doyen in exchange for 300,000 euros. On July 4 of that same year, with FIFA disciplinary proceedings already underway, the club signed a second agreement—an "Economic Rights Participation Agreement"—transferring 25% of the economic rights of a fourth player to Doyen in exchange for 50,000 euros. Both agreements constituted forms of Third Party Ownership (TPO), banned by FIFA since May 1, 2015, through Article 18ter of the RSTP, adopted via FIFA Circular 1464 of December 22, 2014.

On September 4, 2015, the FIFA Disciplinary Committee found the club guilty of breaching Articles 18bis and 18ter of the RSTP and imposed sanctions: a ban on registering players for four complete and consecutive registration periods, and a fine of 150.000 Swiss francs. The FIFA Appeal Committee confirmed the sanctions on January 7, 2016. The club appealed to the CAS.

The award CAS 2016/A/4490, issued on March 9, 2017, by a panel chaired by Bernard Foucher and composed of Bernard Hanotiau and Ruggero Stincardini, did not merely uphold the sanctions. It did something far more significant from the perspective of the debate that Seraing would raise eight years later: it examined the compatibility of Articles 18bis and 18ter of the RSTP with European law. Applying Article 19 of the Swiss Federal Act on Private International Law—which requires arbitral tribunals seated in Switzerland to take into consideration mandatory provisions of foreign law under certain conditions—the panel concluded that the challenged regulations indeed constituted restrictions on the free movement of capital, workers, and services, but that they pursued legitimate objectives—contractual stability, integrity of competitions, prevention of conflicts of interest, transparency in transfer transactions—and were proportionate. The CAS also declared that Articles 18bis and 18ter did not have as their object to restrict, prevent, or distort competition, but rather to regulate the transfer market to achieve those legitimate objectives. The Swiss Federal Tribunal confirmed the award in February 2018.

Concurrently, from April 2015, Seraing and Doyen had turned to the Belgian courts, alleging that FIFA's TPO ban violated EU law. The Brussels Court of Appeal dismissed the appeal in December 2019, considering that the CAS award had acquired the force of res judicata following its confirmation by the Swiss Federal Tribunal, which prevented the national court from ruling on EU law infringements and even from referring preliminary questions to the CJEU. The Belgian Court of Cassation referred the preliminary questions to the CJEU.

On August 1, 2025, the Grand Chamber of the CJEU delivered its judgment in Case C-600/23,^[14] Royal Football Club Seraing SA v. FIFA, UEFA and URBSFA, ECLI:EU:C:2025:617. The question had two dimensions: can a CAS award—confirmed exclusively by the Swiss Federal Tribunal, which is not a court of a Member State and cannot refer preliminary questions to the CJEU—produce the effect of res judicata in the legal systems of the Member States regarding rights that form part of European public policy? Can it also have evidential value against third parties who were not part of the arbitration?

The answer was negative in both cases. The Court established that recourse to CAS arbitration has been unilaterally imposed by sports associations—clubs and players have no practical alternative—and that this forced nature requires individuals to be able to obtain from a court of a Member State effective judicial control over whether the award is compatible with the principles and provisions of Union law that form part of its public policy. The 1958 New York Convention^[15] does not preclude this requirement: for Member States, the public policy review provided for by the Convention must include compliance with EU public policy.

Here emerges the most important structural dimension of Seraing, which the text of the award CAS 2016/A/4490 makes visible. The CAS had examined European law and declared the rules proportionate. The Swiss Federal Tribunal had validated this examination. But this circuit—CAS plus the Swiss Federal Tribunal, both outside the Union's judicial space—does not guarantee that the review included the possibility of referring a preliminary question to the CJEU if the assessment of European law is uncertain or disputed. And without that possibility, the outcome cannot be clothed with the authority of res judicata against the European rights of the parties.

What Seraing does not say is equally relevant: it does not say that the CAS poorly examined European law in that specific case, nor that TPO regulations are necessarily contrary to the Treaty, nor that CAS awards are invalid. The ruling is not a pronouncement on the merits of TPO. It is a pronouncement on the procedural conditions under which an arbitral award can shield itself against the review of compatibility with European public policy. Those conditions, the CJEU concludes, are not satisfied when the only review available has been that of a court of a non-Member State.

The difference between Diarra and Seraing is structurally significant. Diarra attacked substantive rules: Article 17.2 of the RSTP, joint and several liability, the denial of the ITC. Seraing attacks the procedural architecture: the system of imposing and executing lex sportiva which, by its design, excludes the EU legality control required by the Treaty. After Diarra, FIFA must reform rules. After Seraing, the system must rethink where and how disputes involving European rights are resolved—because the chain it considered definitive no longer automatically produces res judicata effects in the legal systems of Member States when it operates outside the judicial space of the Union.

VI. The completed cartography: what remains standing and what has changed

The question that the Bosman - Meca-Medina - Diarra - Seraing sequence raises with the greatest urgency is not whether lex sportiva survives—it does survive—but under what conditions it does so and with what institutional architecture it must be reformulated to remain operational within the European space.

What remains standing is substantial. The CAS remains the benchmark tribunal for international sport. FIFA continues to produce regulations aimed at universal application. The lex sportiva—as a corpus of principles on contractual stability, proportionality of sanctions, and competitive integrity—remains the living law of organized sport. And the mechanisms that the system itself built in response to Bosman—training compensation and the solidarity contribution enshrined in the RSTP—remain intact: no European ruling has challenged them because they successfully pass the very proportionality test established by Meca-Medina. The system learns. No European ruling has sought to replace the sports order with national or Union law. What European rulings have done is map out with increasing precision the conditions under which that order can operate within the European legal space.

These conditions are, after Seraing, as follows: the substantive rules of lex sportiva can restrict fundamental Treaty freedoms only if they are necessary and proportionate to a legitimate objective—the proportionality test established by Meca-Medina and applied by Diarra to the core provisions of Article 17 of the RSTP, with consequences that forced FIFA to reformulate them within weeks. Furthermore, CAS awards resolving disputes regarding those regulations cannot automatically produce res judicata effects in Member States unless a compatibility review with European public policy has been possible by a court empowered to refer preliminary questions to the CJEU—a principle established by Seraing with institutional consequences that are still unfolding.

What has changed is equally substantial. The functional autonomy of lex sportiva—the characterization introduced by the first article of this series as the hermeneutic key to the system—has been delineated in a more explicit and demanding manner than ever before. The specificity of sport remains a valid argument before the CJEU. But it is no longer a shield that exempts the argument from passing the test. And that test, as Diarra demonstrated, can declare contrary to the Treaty regulations that sports federations had built for decades as pillars of their legal order—including rules negotiated with the players' own representatives.

The thesis underpinning this series—lex sportiva as a legal order of conditioned functional autonomy—is not an abstract doctrinal proposal. It is the description of a state of affairs that four CJEU rulings have been confirming, clarifying, and tightening between 1995 and 2025. Sport has its own law. This law operates within a space that the supranational legal order of the Union has delineated and continues to delineate. This delineation is not the end of lex sportiva. It is the condition of its legitimacy.

The next—and final—article of this series will extract the practical consequences of all the above for those who litigate or arbitrate in the system: how to argue before the CAS after Diarra, how to assess the enforceability of a sports award in the European Union after Seraing, and what conditioned functional autonomy means as a working tool for the international sports lawyer.

Case law cited

CJEU, Judgment of 15 December 1995, Case C-415/93, Union Royale Belge des Sociétés de Football Association ASBL and others v. Jean-Marc Bosman and others, ECLI:EU:C:1995:463.
CJEU, Judgment of 18 July 2006, Case C-519/04 P, David Meca-Medina and Igor Majcen v. European Commission (Third Chamber), ECLI:EU:C:2006:492.
CJEU, Judgment of 1 June 1999, Case C-126/97, Eco Swiss China Time Ltd v. Benetton International NV, ECLI:EU:C:1999:269. [Precedent on the control of European public policy in arbitral awards.]
CJEU, Judgment of 21 December 2023, Case C-333/21, European Superleague Company SL v. FIFA and UEFA, ECLI:EU:C:2023:1011.
CJEU, Judgment of 4 October 2024, Case C-650/22, FIFA v. BZ (Second Chamber), ECLI:EU:C:2024:824.
CJEU, Judgment of 1 August 2025, Case C-600/23, Royal Football Club Seraing SA v. Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), Union Royale Belge des Sociétés de Football Association (URBSFA), Union des Associations Européennes de Football (UEFA), and Doyen Sports Investment Ltd. (Grand Chamber), ECLI:EU:C:2025:617.
CAS 2016/A/4490, RFC Seraing v. Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), award of 9 March 2017 (Panel: Foucher, President; Hanotiau; Stincardini).
Swiss Federal Tribunal, judgment of 20 February 2018, 4A_260/2017 - confirmation of CAS award 2016/A/4490.
Swiss Federal Tribunal, judgment of March 15, 1993, Gundel v. Fédération Équestre Internationale—foundational case on the institutional independence of the CAS.

Literature cited

Infantino, G. (n.d.). "Meca-Medina: a step backwards for the European sports model and the specificity of sport?". Institutional document, UEFA Legal Services Division. Available at: editorial.uefa.com.
Foster, K. (2005). "Lex Sportiva and Lex Ludica: The Court of Arbitration for Sport's Jurisprudence". Entertainment and Sports Law Journal, vol. 3, no. 2.
Latty, F. (2007). La lex sportiva: Recherche sur le droit transnational. Martinus Nijhoff Publishers.
Nafziger, J.A.R. (2004). International Sports Law (2nd ed.). Transnational Publishers.
Casini, L. (2011). "The Making of a Lex Sportiva by the Court of Arbitration for Sport". German Law Journal, vol. 12, no. 5, pp. 1317–1340.
Duval, A. (2015). "Lex Sportiva: A Playground for Transnational Law". European Law Journal, vol. 21, no. 2.

Analyzed case law and commentaries consulted

FIFA, Circular 1464, of 22 December 2014 — adoption of Article 18ter of the RSTP (ban on TPO).
FIFA, Circular 1917, of 23 December 2024 — post-Diarra provisional regulatory framework, effective from January 1, 2025.
FIFPRO Europe, Press release, 4 October 2024 — institutional reaction to the Diarra judgment, fifpro.org.
FIFPRO Europe, "Explicación de la sentencia Lassana Diarra: ¿qué significa para los futbolistas?", May 2025, fifpro.org.

Legal analyses consulted

Garrigues (2024). "Diarra case: the CJEU concludes that certain FIFA regulations on professional player transfers are contrary to Competition Law", garrigues.com.
Cuatrecasas (2024). "The future of the FIFA international transfer system following the CJEU's judgment", cuatrecasas.com.
Senn Ferrero & Asociados (2025). "Comments on the recent approval of a provisional regulatory framework by FIFA following the Diarra case", sennferrero.com.
Pérez-Llorca (2025). "The CJEU sets limits on the recognition of CAS awards", perezllorca.com.

Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU), Article 165, in force since December 1, 2009 (Lisbon Treaty). ↩︎
ECJ, Judgment of 15 December 1995, Case C-415/93, Union Royale Belge des Sociétés de Football Association ASBL and others v. Jean-Marc Bosman and others, ECLI:EU:C:1995:463. ↩︎
The Salvador de Bahía Open Water Swimming World Cup was held on January 31, 1999. ↩︎
FINA Doping Panel, Decision of 8 August 1999. ↩︎
Court of First Instance of the European Communities, Judgment of 30 September 2004, T-313/02, Meca-Medina and Igor Majcen v. Commission. ↩︎
Opinion of Advocate General Léger, 23 March 2006, Case C-519/04 P. ↩︎
CJEU, Judgment of 18 July 2006, Case C-519/04 P, David Meca-Medina and Igor Majcen v. European Commission (Third Chamber), ECLI:EU:C:2006:492, §27 and §28. ↩︎
CJEU, Judgment of 19 February 2002, Case C-309/99, J.C.J. Wouters and others v. Algemene Raad van de Nederlandse Orde van Advocaten, ECLI:EU:C:2002:98, §97. ↩︎
Infantino, G. (n.d.). ‘Meca-Medina: a step backwards for the European sports model and the specificity of sport?’. Institutional document, UEFA Legal Services Division. Available at: editorial.uefa.com. ↩︎
CJEU, Judgment of 4 October 2024, Case C-650/22, FIFA v. BZ (Second Chamber), ECLI:EU:C:2024:824. ↩︎
FIFA, Circular 1917, of 23 December 2024—post-Diarra provisional regulatory framework, effective from January 1, 2025. ↩︎
FIFPRO Europe, Press release, 4 October 2024; and FIFPRO Europe, ‘Explicación de la sentencia Lassana Diarra: ¿qué significa para los futbolistas?’, May 2025, fifpro.org. ↩︎
CAS 2016/A/4490, RFC Seraing v. Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), award of 9 March 2017 (Panel: Foucher, President; Hanotiau; Stincardini). ↩︎
CJEU, Judgment of 1 August 2025, Case C-600/23, Royal Football Club Seraing SA v. FIFA, UEFA and URBSFA (Grand Chamber), ECLI:EU:C:2025:617. ↩︎
Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards (New York, June 10, 1958). ↩︎