Constitutionalising the European sports model: the opinion of Advocate General Rantos in the European Super League case

On 15 December, Advocate General Rantos, a member of the Court of Justice of the European Union, published an initial opinion on whether UEFA and FIFA’s opposition to the creation of a European Super League in 2021 breached EU competition law. Jan Zglinski examines what the opinion means for sport in Europe

Rules, standards, and the video assistant referee in football

Introduced with the hope of reducing refereeing errors and increasing “football justice”, the Video Assistant Referee (VAR) has attracted much criticism from players and spectators alike. Drawing on evidence from domestic and international competitions from the past three years, this article investigates the problems that have become apparent with the system. It argues that the success of technological aids like the VAR depends on the nature of the norms on which they adjudicate. Just like legal norms, football laws can be divided into rules and standards. While the VAR has the ability to make a substantial contribution to enforcing the former, its added value for policing the latter is more limited

The idea of Europe in football

The article explores the Europeanisation of football, focusing on two dimensions of this process: its affective and regulatory dimension. Developments such as the creation of pan-European club competitions and growing cross-border movement of players mean that ‘Europe’ plays an ever more important role in football on an affective level. The same is true on a regulatory level, where EU law and policy have come to impact on various aspects of football, ranging from transfer rules, to club financing, to the sale of broadcasting rights. We argue that only by examining the interaction between these two dimensions can we truly understand what is ‘European’ about football. The article shows that there continues to be strong support in football for the cultural elements of the European Sport Model, including a commitment to local identity, sporting merit and solidarity. By contrast, its governance aspects are increasingly coming under pressure, as the recent European Super League saga illustrates. Our findings suggest that the EU can – and should – do more to improve regulatory standards in football and push for a greater representation of fans and other stakeholders that have currently no, or limited, voice in the football pyramid

The rise of deference: the margin of appreciation and decentralized judicial review in EU free movement law

An institution erstwhile known for its activism, the ECJ has, in recent years, rendered a growing number of judgments marked by caution, especially when reviewing Member State acts. Through doctrines such as the margin of appreciation, the Court has granted national authorities substantial deference. This article investigates how and when the Court defers to the Member States. It focuses on free movement adjudication and, more specifically, on the way in which the ECJ conducts justification and proportionality review. Drawing on an empirical study of free movement case law (1974-2013), it is argued that an important shift has taken place in EU law: the ECJ is scaling down its control over Member State measures and increasingly delegates decision-making tasks to national institutions, both political and judicial

Understanding EU legal integration/disintegration : in search of new perspectives

This report summarises the UACES/ James Madison Trust EUFutures Research Network Launch Workshop entitled 'Understanding legal integration/disintegration: in search of new perspectives'. The event consisted of four panels on 'Interdisciplinary research on EU law', 'Research Methods and EU law', 'Understanding the EU's integration processes' and 'Understanding EU law through soft law, discourse, ideas & beliefs', respectively. The future of EU legal integration is at a significant juncture with the departure of the UK, substantial rule of law challenges, internal and external crises, and an increasingly apathetic multilateral legal order. There is increased recognition amongst EU lawyers, who have historically limited themselves to doctrinal analysis and legal hermeneutics, that methodology plays an essential role in order to understand EU integration and shape its future. The question remains though how to connect interdisciplinary approaches to EU law, policy and politics. How should EU law (as an object) be studied? What are the respective merits of each discipline (political science, sociology, economy, history) in explaining the way EU law is created, applied, used, transformed in the process of EU integration? What is the added value of bringing together different approaches to law? In particular, how can EU law (as an academic discipline) open itself up to the methods of the social sciences and what, in return, can law offer to our understanding of EU studies more widely? In order to answer these questions, EUFutures brings together scholars for this workshop to: reflect on the future methodological direction(s) of EU law and EU integration and consider both how law could open itself up to methodologies from other disciplines, and what legal analysis could offer political, economic and historical approaches

Editorial : on age and legal genius

Science’s most famous cat was an oddity. Not only did she have the formidable capacity to be both dead and alive when put in a box with radioactive material, her master Erwin Schrödinger was, even at the tender age of 38, thought much too old to have ‘created’ her in the first place.1 Theoretical physics was a young man’s game at the beginning of the 20th century. Heisenberg was 25 when formulating the uncertainty principle, Einstein published his work on the photoelectric effect at 26, Bohr proposed the model of the hydrogen atom when 28. Quantum mechanics lived by the maxim: ‘a person who has not made his great contribution to science before the age of thirty will never do so’

Editorial : on failure

It is probably as much a trait of the academic profession as a mirror of the times we live in that the contributions featured in this issue circle around one theme: failure. Failure has many faces. It can be personal as in the case of Dimitrios Pachtitis, a young Greek who missed out on being short-listed for the second stage of an EPSO competition by just 3 points (discussed in : Jaime Rodriguez Medal, ‘Transparency in the Staff Selection Procedure of the EU Institutions: Comments on the Pachtitis Case’). It can also be institutional. Sergii Shcherbak’s article on Bitcoin, very timely in light of the latest warnings issued by the European Central Bank, the Banca d’Italia and the French police, is both a plea for the regulation of the virtual currency as well as a demonstration of the EU’s and Member States’ apathy in this field (‘How Should Bitcoin Be Regulated?’)

Europe’s passive virtues: deference to national authorities in EU free movement law

The European Court of Justice has been celebrated as a central force in the creation and deepening of the EU internal market. Yet, it has also been criticized for engaging in judicial activism, restricting national regulatory autonomy, and taking away the powers of Member State institutions. In recent years, the Court appears to afford greater deference to domestic actors in free movement cases. Europe's Passive Virtues explores the scope of and reasons for this phenomenon. It enquires into the decision-making latitude given to the Member States through two doctrines: the margin of appreciation and decentralized judicial review. At the heart of the book lies an original empirical study of the European Court's free movement jurisprudence from 1974 to 2013. The analysis examines how frequently and under which circumstances the Court defers to national authorities. The results suggest that free movement law has substantially changed over the past four decades. The Court is leaving a growing range of decisions in the hands of national law-makers and judges, a trend that affects the level of scrutiny applied to Member State action, the division of powers between the European and national judiciary, and ultimately the nature of the internal market. The book argues that these new-found 'passive virtues' are linked to a series of broader political, constitutional, and institutional developments that have taken place in the E