Sport policy-making

Footballer Jean Marc Bosman, due to a dispute over his transfer between clubs, took his case to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) on the grounds that the decision, by Standard Liege, to block his transfer to the French team Dunkerque, was a restraint of trade. The Court found in his favour, a decision which radically changed the power relations between players and their clubs and led subsequently to UEFA being forced abandon its rules on the number of foreign players that a club could field. From the point of view of the ECJ, it was simply enforcing the articles of the Treaty of Rome, the founding treaty of the European Union, in relation to the free movement of labour. Professional sport was required to operate within the same legal framework as other European businesses (Antonioni and Cubbin 2000; Binder and Findley 2012). The racial segregation policy of apartheid in South Africa, which affected every aspect of life in the country, not only hampered the development of non-white sporting talent, but imbued major sports such as rugby union and cricket with intense political symbolism (Lapchick 1977; Nauright 1997). Finally, the decision by the People’s Republic of China to re-join the Olympic Movement was part of a much broader strategy aimed at achieving the diplomatic isolation of the Republic of China/Taiwan (Chan 1985; Lijun 2002).