We are still told that elite sport and politics should not mix. This is patronising. They cannot help but mix.
It’s 52 years since Sir Stanley Rous was ousted as president of FIFA, world football’s governing body. It was suggested that his fiscal integrity had become intolerable to fellow blazers who were much more interested in making money than the beautiful game. Unfortunately, the colonially minded Rous allowed South Africa to field all-white teams in the apartheid era. This finished him.
Rous may have been a dinosaur, but the legacy of the presidents who followed is the bloated if fitfully entertaining circus presently playing out on your TV. Four quarters and two bonus advertising breaks (sorry, hydration breaks) per match. And extortionate ticket prices to participate in a spectacle that would not exist if no one paid through the nose to be there.
Covid-19 tested Jock Stein’s dictum that ‘football is nothing without fans’. FIFA took the risk of testing it some more before this year’s quadrennial beanfeast. Yet still they come, in their thousands.
When money talks, of course, the legal profession listens. Which explains in part the relatively new and thriving specialism of sports law – if it can be so called.
Is sports law a discrete area of legal practice? Yes and no.
Less ambiguous is its potential, fast being realised. The Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne was not established until 1984, but today features on newspaper back pages on an almost daily basis. Here in London, we have Sport Resolutions, established as recently as 1997.
Both organisations make momentous decisions affecting those of us whose interest in sport is otherwise purely ludic. (See Feature)
This is regrettable, in one respect. Top sports silk Nick De Marco notes that it is better for sporting contests to be decided on the field, track or velodrome than in a courtroom. But where there is muck (on your boots), there’s brass.
Sports law must seem glamorous to the layperson, too (see this week’s My Legal Life). I once watched Man City play Bayern Munich in the company of a sports lawyer – the only time I have enjoyed a heated seat and canapés at the footie. It beats a damp terrace and a lukewarm pie. No disputing that.
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