The new floor beneath sport: EU judicial oversight after ISU, Seraing and FIGC & CONI

An athlete or club loses at the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), the Swiss Federal Tribunal (SFT) rejects the challenge, and the file is closed; not just at CAS, but everywhere. That has been the practical reality for EU-based parties for as long as CAS has existed: once the SFT rules, national courts have generally declined to reopen questions of EU-law compatibility, treating the matter as res judicata (already judged).

That assumption no longer holds. A trio of judgments by Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has begun placing a mandatory floor of EU judicial protection beneath the architecture of sports dispute resolution itself, not merely the substantive rules that architecture enforces, meaning a CAS award, or a federation’s own internal disciplinary decision, can now be reopened before an EU court in defined circumstances.  This article examines the judgments and what they mean in practical terms for EU sports organisations. Readers will learn when a CAS award or a federation’s internal decision can be reviewed against EU public policy, what powers the reviewing body must have, and what sports organisations should audit in their own dispute-resolution structures.

Article overview

• Background: from conditional autonomy to scrutiny of dispute-resolution architecture
• ISU: dispute resolution as a legal problem in its own right
• Seraing: what national courts must be able to do with a CAS award
• FIGC and CONI: beyond CAS to federations’ internal justice bodies
• Practical implications for EU sports organisations
• One principle, two routes: towards “constitutionalised autonomy”