“ISU, Superleague and Royal Antwerp Cases: from Specialty Towards Efficiency”, by Rusa Agafonova

Introduction

On 21 December 2023, the European Court of Justice (‘the Court’) delivered three major sports antitrust cases, the highly acclaimed European Superleague Company (C-333/21) and a less known by general public but in many ways as interesting International Skating Union v Commission (C-124/21 P) and Royal Antwerp Football Club (C-680/21). These judgments are remarkable for multiple reasons: they assess sporting matters from a more economic and less formalist perspective, tackle multiple problems of the actual sports governance (gatekeeping, lack of transparency, forced arbitration, unilaterality of policymaking processes, etc.) and have sufficient potential to re-structure sports organisation.

The European sports