The monopoly in sport events and competition law : the contribute of the international skating union´s eligibility rules anti-trust procedure to the change of paradigm

Abstract

In the last decades, the sport has suffered a great development, especially in the economic level. In fact, the sport moves enormous sums of money and has acquired a very important role in the national and international markets. For this reason and many others, the regulation of the sport activity requires special attention. However, purely sporting issues are rare nowadays and the margin of autonomy for the sport governing bodies becomes smaller and smaller. One of the situations in which this is particularly evident is the organization and commercial exploitation of sports competitions. We propose to analyse the admissibility of the current scheme of the organization of such events. To that purpose, we analyse the investigation of the European Commission to the ISU regulations, in particular the eligibility rules. We found that such a structure is not compatible with competition rules. Thus, we present some proposals for structural reforms of sports governing bodies