Dispute resolution in sports
Organised sports have undergone far-reaching modernisation in recent decades, both organizationally and structurally. This inevitably entails increasing legalisation. After all, more and more aspects of sports require specific regulations. As a result, the number of sports-related disputes is also growing. Dispute resolution in sports has taken an important place in legal practice in recent years.
The sports world has traditionally wanted to organise itself autonomously. People also want to avoid any form of government interference in the field of conflict resolution. This could, among other things, lead to transnational sports law rules being interpreted differently, depending on the jurisdiction in which they are raised.
To ensure the uniform application of sports law rules, as well as compliance with the specificities of sports, the sports world has developed its own dispute settlement mechanisms.
The two most commonly used dispute resolution techniques in sports are disciplinary law and arbitration. Each of the two mechanisms is briefly explained in the next two contributions.
Disciplinary law: the internal route
Disciplinary law is the mechanism a federation uses against its own members. Its source is contractual: by joining, a member accepts the statutes and the regulations, and those texts describe which conduct is punishable, which body decides and which sanctions can follow. The bodies are internal to the sport, the procedure is written by the sport, and the sanctions are sporting ones, from a reprimand to a suspension or an exclusion.
Because the source is contractual, the limits are contractual as well. A federation can punish only conduct that its own rules describe as punishable, and only through the body those rules designate. It also has to respect the general principles that apply to any procedure affecting a person: knowledge of the accusation, access to the file, an opportunity to be heard, and a reasoned decision. Those points, rather than the facts, decide a large share of the appeals.
Arbitration: the external route
Arbitration replaces the ordinary courts with a tribunal that the parties accept. It rests on an arbitration agreement, whether in a contract between two parties or in the statutes of a federation. The award binds the parties and can be enforced, and the grounds on which a court may set it aside are narrow. That is the attraction of the mechanism and also its risk. In sport the best known institution is the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne.
The attraction is uniformity and speed. A rule that applies worldwide should not take a different meaning in every national court, and a competition calendar cannot wait for ordinary proceedings. In exchange the parties give up an appeal on the substance. Where an athlete has no genuine choice about accepting the clause, that trade-off is exactly what has been examined critically in recent years, and it is why the procedural guarantees inside sports arbitration have been tightened.
Which route applies to your file
The answer sits in the texts, not in the preference of the parties. Read the statutes and the regulations of the federation together with any contract, and find three things: which body has jurisdiction over this type of claim, within which period it has to be seized, and whether its decision can be appealed and to whom. Where two texts point in different directions, the more specific one usually governs.
Do that reading before you file anything. A claim brought before the wrong body is not passed on to the right one. It is dismissed, and by then the period for the correct route has often expired.
The two routes are not alternatives that exclude each other. A disciplinary decision taken inside a federation is frequently the decision that is then brought before an arbitral tribunal, so the internal file is the foundation of the external one. What you fail to raise at the internal stage is difficult to introduce later.
Series on dispute resolution in sports: disciplinary law in sports and arbitration in sports.