Paragraph 31 of C-519/04 Meca-Medina reversed.

• Author: Pijetlovic, Katarina
• Position: OPINION - Report

In paragraphs 31-33 of Meca-Medina judgment the European Court of Justice has set aside the decisions of the Court of First Instance by finding an error in law. It held that:

'even if those rules do not constitute restrictions on freedom of movement because they concern questions of purely sporting interest and, as such, have nothing to do with economic activity, that fact means neither that the sporting activity in question necessarily falls outside the scope of Articles 81 EC and 82 EC nor that the rules do not satisfy the specific requirements of those articles. However, [...] the Court of First Instance held that the fact that purely sporting rules may have nothing to do with economic activity, with the result that they do not fall within the scope of Articles 39 EC and 49 EC, means, also, that they have nothing to do with the economic relationships of competition, with the result that they also do not fall within the scope of Articles 81 EC and 82 EC. In holding that rules could thus be excluded straightaway from the scope of those articles solely on the ground that they were regarded as purely sporting with regard to the application of Articles 39 EC and 49 EC, without any need to determine first whether the rules fulfilled the specific requirements of Articles 81 EC and 82 EC, as set out in paragraph 30 of the present judgment, the Court of First Instance made an error of law.' Therefore, the rules found to be purely sporting for the purpose of freedom of movement provisions, are not by the virtue of that fact also excluded from the assessment under competition provisions. They have to satisfy the requirements of both set of the Treaty rules separately. The UEFA's Gianni Infantino commented:

'[...]it is important to recall that the European Court of First Instance reasoned that if a sports rule was "non-economic" in character (and so outside the prohibitions of free movement law) then logically the same rule would be outside the prohibitions of competition law as well. It is submitted that there is a powerful logic to this position, stemming from the fact that the EC Treaty itself only applies to "economic activities" within the meaning of Article 2 (an approach that goes back to Walrave). Consequently, if a sports rule is "non-economic" in character the Treaty (i.e. all of it) does not apply and that is the end of the matter. However, in what can only be described as a strange twist, the ECJ held that even if a sports rule has...