Is sport really special, and if so, should that special character be granted legal recognition? These are some of the core questions confronting sports lawyers that Professor Weatherill considers in the book under review. It deals with a topic that does not attract much attention in EU law books and yet concerns a human activity universally known and practiced everywhere and socially extremely important.
Not many authors could be a better fit than Professor Weatherill to write such a book. He has been writing on this subject for nearly thirty years, gaining a rare and consolidated knowledge in this field of law, which finds its best epilogue in this monograph, published in the prestigious Oxford EU Law Library.
The book is not just an overview of EU rules on sport. It addresses the special nature of sport and how its “autonomy” can be recognized in the legal order. It is a well-known problem that sports enjoys or is intended as a special area of human activity that, according to common opinion, deserves some kind of special law. For instance, under Italian law, many of the general rules of private and public law do not apply to sports activities and relations between associations and players and even judicial review is limited and exercised differently.
Sport is, in some respects special and Weatherill argues that although there is some autonomy it should not go too far. He demonstrates that EU law grants conditional autonomy to practices in sport and that the European Commission has had an approach to the issue of cooperation rather than one based on top-down command and control. More importantly, the Author concludes that “EU sports law deserves to be treated as an intellectual distinct discipline.”
The book will appeal to practitioners and scholars involved in or interested in the topic. The reader will find an authoritative discussion of the EU legal context relating to sports and how the “autonomy” of sport finds its place within the general framework of relevant EU law principles.
Riccardo Sciaudone
Head
Reviewed November 2018