COVID-19: four key legal issues for Philippine sports organisations to consider on return to play

Friday, 12 June 2020 By Mickey Ingles

After more than two months of slumber, Philippine sports is slowly making a comeback. Of course, this comeback won’t be as quick and easy as sending a fax that says, “I’m back.” There are a lot of challenges that Philippine sports has to hurdle to get back on its feet. We have a long way to go before we can sit in a packed stadium cheering our idols again, but we’re on our way.

Assuming government directives will soon allow sports and mass gatherings to recommence, this article identifies four key legal issues that must be addressed by the domestic sports industry as it heads back to the field, court, or gym, namely

The duty of care owed by event organizers/facility owners to fans and sports participants;
The duties on schools/universities to provide safety protocols and resolve residency and eligibility issues;
The duties on sports employers to comply with existing labor laws and guidelines regarding their staff; and
The resolution of contractual disputes – especially commercial contracts – ideally via negotiation and redrafting.

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Tags: Basketball | Commercial | Coronavirus | COVID-19 | Duty of Care | Employment | Philippines

About the Author

Mickey Ingles

Lawyer & Professor, Ingles Laurel Calderon & Ateneo de Manila University

Ignatius Michael “Mickey” Ingles is a licensed Philippine attorney, and specializes in Philippine sports and tax law. He assists in the sports, corporate, and tax engagements on the Law Firm of Ingles Laurel and Calderon, a boutique law firm in Makati City, Philippines. Mickey is also a licensed attorney in the State of New York.

He obtained his Master of Law (LL.M.) from the Georgetown Law Center in 2016. He graduated salutatorian from the Ateneo Law School in 2012 (J.D.) where he was also named the Most Distinguished Graduate.

He is the author of Laws for Sports and the Sporty, a handbook on Philippine sports law, and Tax Made Less Taxing, a law textbook on Philippine tax laws. He is also the founder and editor-in-chief of Batas Sportiva, the Philippines’ only sports law blog. He has also written on various legal topics such as robotics and sports law for law journals both in the United States and the Philippines. He is set to contribute to the Wolters Kluwer International Encyclopedia of Sports Law in 2020.

He is also a full-time professor in the Ateneo Law School where he currently teaches Constitutional Law, Emerging Issues in Sports Law, and Artificial Intelligence, Robots, and the Law. His courses in Sports Law and Robots Law are the only classes of its kind offered in the Philippines.

Before his career in law, Mickey was an accomplished collegiate athlete, captaining the Ateneo de Manila University Football Team to three straight university championships.