COMMERCIAL REGULATION OF SPORT

Commercial Regulation of Sport

Commercial Regulation of Sport

Introduction

Modern sport is intermediated, controlled and contested by great numbers of organisations, headed by what can be termed global modern sports organisations (GSOs). The GSOs can be defined as the supreme organs of governance in modern sport whose authority is global. Pre-eminent among the GSOs are organisations such as The International Federation of Football Associations (FIFA), the International Olympic Committee (IOC), the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) and the World Anti-Doping Authority (WADA), respectively the supreme governing bodies for soccer, the Olympic Games, athletics and anti-doping (see Appendix for details of all GSOs discussed). Equally GSOs but among the less prominent are the World Arm-Modern sport Federation (WAF - arm-wrestling), the International Federation of Modern sports Acrobatics (IFSA - acrobatics), the International Federation for Robo-Soccer (FIRA - robot soccer) and the International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF - ice-hockey).

The growing body of international modern sports law is concerned more with the governance of athletes' behaviour, and their relationships with their organisations and rules than with the organisations themselves (for examples see the International Association of Modern sports Law, 2004). Partly this is unavoidable as corrupt financial practice is a matter for criminal or corporate law within national jurisdictions. In addition the corruption is often political rather than directly financial. Thus the President of a GSO can use financial patronage to poorer national associations to secure votes their in presidential elections. The GSOs individually claim a variety of governance and other functions. GSOs make public their objectives, goals and other functions statements with varying degrees of explicitness in their documentation, obtained through accessing GSO web sites (see Appendix). Lists of GSOs for specific modern sports and their websites can be gleaned from a variety of sources including the GAISF web site, while those concerned with global events can be found at the World Games site (see Appendix) and at the International Games Archive (Bell, 2004). Their functions usually comprise some subset of the composite list below:

the creation and maintenance of the laws and rules of a modern sport and its competitions;

the global development of a modern sport at all levels;

the development and governance of the athletes within a modern sport;

arbitration and/or resolution of disputes within a modern sport;

holding of global events, such as world championships, within the modern sport;

maintenance of relationships with modern sporting bodies within a modern sport especially affiliated national associations within the modern sport;

maintenance of relationships with governments, regulatory authorities and those modern sporting bodies outside the modern sport; and

maintenance of relationships with commercial entities such as sponsors.

Given numerous functions the GSOs do not form a homogeneous group but each GSO primarily serves one of three main functions taken from those above, allow groupings to be made. These are:

Governance of a modern sport at the global level, such as FIFA. GSOs in this group include the ICC, IRB, IIHF, FIA and the FIH (see Appendix).

Governance of a global modern sporting event, such as the IOC and the IOC affiliated International ...