Editor's note:
Dr
Borja
García joined the School of Sport, Health and Exercise Sciences at Loughbourough University in January
2009 as a Lecturer in Sport Management and Policy. He holds a PhD in Politics,
International Relations and European Studies from Loughborough University
(United Kingdom), where he completed his thesis titled ‘The European Union and
the Governance of Football: A game of levels and agendas’.
In
this leafy and relatively mild autumn, we are celebrating two important
anniversaries. Recently, we just passed ‘Back to the Future day’, marking the
arrival of Marty McFly to 2015. In a few weeks, we will be commemorating the
20th anniversary of the Bosman ruling. Difficult to decide which
one of the two is more important. As we move well into the 21st century’s
second decade, these two dates should mark a moment to consider innovation.
They are perhaps occasions to take stock and reflect how much sport has evolved
to reach this new future… or not.
When
Marty McFly ‘landed’ on October 21st 2015, at 4.29 PM, he found a whole new
world. Flying skateboards, holograms, massive jumbo screens… There was not much
reference to sport governance in Back to the Future, although in the vein of
the rest of the film, one would anticipate a modern, innovative and decidedly
better sporting world. However, if Marty McFly, coming from the 1980s or 1990s,
had arrived into the real October 21st 2015 and looked at the
present state of sport governance, he may have thought his De Lorean was not
working properly! Twenty years on from Bosman,
and more than a decade since major scandals that were supposed to change the
landscape of sport (so we were told back then), a familiar feeling of déjà-vu emerges when reading the sport
news nowadays.
The
late 1980s and 1990s were characterised by legal insecurity, scandals and
transformation in the governance of sport. There were legal challenges to the
legitimacy of governing bodies. Bosman
was just one of them, but on the back of the ruling the European Commission was
inundated with questions related to the application of EU law to the rules of
sport governing bodies. Those were also days of major public opinion upheaval
against the institutionalised doping or the mismanagement of the IOC.
Fast
forward to 2015 and we find ourselves in a very similar situation! After a
period of relative calm, legal challenges from stakeholders against rules and
regulations of governing bodies have flourished everywhere. Dutch skaters against
ISU, Mr. Striani against UEFA, FIFPro against the international transfer
system, the Spanish and Portuguese leagues against FIFA... just to name a few. Moreover,
it seems as if doping and corruption never left us. It was cycling back then,
and Russian athletics now. It was the Olympics and Salt Lake City in the 1990s,
football, Russia and Qatar now. It seems not much progress has been achieved in
20 years.
Why
is that? One of the reasons is that, despite some changes and mild
modernisation, the governance structures are still very similar. No flying
skateboards around FIFA or the IOC, I am afraid. Sport continues to be regulated
by international federations trying to keep their place at the top of a pyramid
that, however, is no longer there because it has given place to a much more
complex network. The transformation from vertical governance to horizontal
structures, that caused many problems in the public sector as described by Rod Rhodes[1]
(among others), has not been correctly addressed in sport.
As
Jack Anderson has correctly
pointed out, perhaps one of the problems is that the current political
governance structures of sport are not fit for purpose. They lack real
separation of powers. For example, when the Spanish athlete (now a senator!)
Marta Domínguez is allegedly accused of doping due to
irregularities in her blood passport, WADA
sends the dossier to the Spanish Athletics Federation, in which Domínguez was a
vice-president for a few years, serving under the current president (who has
been in charge since 1989, so probably Marty McFly knows him well!). Can the
disciplinary committees of such a body be really independent and be expected to
pass a clear and decisive judgment? Of course, they cannot and have
not done so!
But
the questions are perhaps more systemic. Are international sport federations
really fit for the purpose of modern sport? The new reality of sport is one
where the commercial dimension is increasingly divorcing from the coveted
grassroots or sport-for-all Holy Grail. ISFs, and most public sport policies,
are still attempting to house these two different realities under one common
roof. Questions need to be asked as to whether this confusion des genres is even possible. There was a time in which
the European Commission suggested that international federations had to
separate their regulatory and commercial roles. But not much has been done in
that respect since the Formula 1 case. Perhaps it should be
accepted that elite and professional sport needs a new approach. If ISFs are
serious, they need to start putting in place much more modern management and
governance structures. Executive committees need to stop being ‘representative’
of the stakeholders, turning to be ‘skills based’. They need, of course, to be
much more age, race and gender diverse. Independent directors need to be fully
incorporated to councils, boards and federations’ EXCOs. Standing committees
need to be more independent and need to have targets… This is nothing new, but
it reads as a revolution in the world of international sport.
Given
the governance failures of sport, it is often questioned whether public
authorities could/should/ought to regulate or bring sport to account. Here, it
seems fair to say that following the political ‘backlash’ of Bosman, aptly articulated by some sport
bodies, politicians have erred on the cautious side. The idea that the EU “was
trying to kill club football in Europe”, as put forward by Lennart Johanson on
16 December 1995 was powerful enough to discourage the EU, and other public
authorities for that matter, to regulate sport. The reality is that, to date,
perhaps the EU is the only public body that has managed to bring to account international
sport, even in a limited fashion, as I have argued in a recent
article[2].
The mainstreaming of the autonomy and specificity of sport into EU policies,
however, has deterred EU institutions from pursuing a much more proactive
approach in the control and regulation of sport.
After
Bosman, there was a period in which
both sport and EU law found each other. There were negotiations and some
changes in both sides. There were even positive noises coming from different
social dialogue committees. The calm, however, has been broken abruptly. And we
have woken up back to the future, as if 1995 had never passed. ASSER’s very own
Antoine Duval, and some authors such as Arnout Geeraert
have recently argued that the EU should be much stronger in its application of
EU law to sport. The problem is: can they really do it? In an increasingly Eurosceptic
environment amongst the peoples of Europe, can the EU really risk trying to
have a go at sport? It can be argued, that sport as an area of ‘soft politics’
and popular culture may give the EU some of its lost legitimacy back. But I am
not so sure. In a recent survey, part of the FREE Project,
we asked Europeans in nine countries whether they trusted the EU (amongst other
bodies) to regulate the governance of football. The answer was clear: No, they do
not. Of the nine different organisations offered in the survey, the EU was the
third least trusted body, only above the media and national governments. In the
survey, only 40% of the Europeans in the nine countries polled trusted the EU
in this respect. This goes down to 21% when the
survey is restricted to core football fans, not the general public. In other
words, Europeans do not trust the EU, nor national governments to improve the
governance of football. So, if the EU tries to have a stronger position in the
application of European law and policies to sport, it may well backfire.
Normally,
I have refrained from such a normative approach to governance. As a political
scientist, I prefer to analyse what actors do, rather than to tell them, what
to do. However, it is clear to me that what they have done so far is not
working. Twenty years on from Bosman, and a visit of Marty McFly after, the
‘future’ of international sport governance looks conspicuously similar to the
past. And it is not good. We need a solution that brings us to the future, to a
real future where the past is finally put to rest.