The European Union’s Court of Justice (“ECJ”) went into the 2023 winter break in style, publishing a hat-trick of judgments (hereafter referred to as SuperLeague, ISU, and Royal Antwerp) regarding the application of competition law to the governance of sport. These judgments are an El Classico of sorts for sports and competition law aficionados, with far reaching implications for rule-makers (such as FIFA, UEFA, the ISU, national sports associations and other sports governing bodies), players, clubs, fans, and other sectors more generally. This article details the factual background of the judgments, before assessing in turn, key implications in terms of sports governance and competition law. The judgments (ISU and SuperLeague in particular) strongly affirm the application of competition law to the governance of sports, and may subsequently result in many sports governing bodies revisiting the content and application of their rules.  

The ECJ’s recent preliminary ruling in C-211/22 - Super Bock Bebidas (“Super Bock”) is significant for businesses and competition authorities. It is well-established that categorisation of conduct as a ‘by object’ infringement of Article 101(1) TFEU must be considered by reference to whether, on a case-by-case basis, the agreement presents a sufficient degree of harm to competition. Super Bock is the first occasion on which the ECJ has applied this principle to vertical agreements fixing minimum resale prices (aka resale price maintenance, or “RPM”). In applying established principles to the vertical RPM setting, the ECJ’s analysis in Super Bock is unsurprising. However, it does formally reverse the Court’s earlier judgment in C-243/83 - SA Binon, and in doing so continues the ECJ’s retreat from assessing ‘by object’ infringements as according to their form, rather than their substance, under Article 101 TFEU. In this article we assess the impact of Super Bock, with analysis of its impact for businesses and competition authorities.