On 1 August 2025, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) delivered its judgment in RFC Seraing SA v FIFA (C-600/23). The decision clarifies that sports arbitration cannot bypass scrutiny from EU courts if the subject matter engages fundamental rights guaranteed by EU law, even if the dispute in question has already been scrutinised by a non-EU court.

The decision reflects a consistent theme of recent European case law (see in particular, ISU and Semenya) limiting the autonomy of sports governing bodies, and also has implications for team owners, directors and investors, and players both within and outside the EU.

Background

In 2015, Belgian football club RFC Seraing (Seraing) entered into a third-party ownership agreement (TPO) with Maltese investment fund Doyen Sports (Doyen). The TPO in question gave Doyen economic rights over certain players at the club. 

FIFA subsequently imposed disciplinary sanctions against Seraing, namely, a fine and transfer ban, because TPOs violate its regulations. FIFA’s decision to sanction the club was upheld by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) in Lausanne. That CAS award was subsequently upheld on appeal to the Swiss Federal Supreme Court.

However, Seraing was also pursuing parallel proceedings in the Belgian courts, seeking a ruling that FIFA’s TPO rules violated EU law, and claiming damages. The Commercial Court in Belgium found that it did not have jurisdiction to consider these requests. Seraing appealed, but the Belgian Court of Appeal found that the club’s allegations that the TPO rules infringed EU law had (by that time) already been rejected by the CAS. As such, Belgian law required them to be treated as res judicata from the date when the Swiss Federal Supreme Court dismissed Seraing’s appeal of the CAS award.

Seraing, therefore, took its case to Belgium’s highest court, the Court of Cassation. Because the case raised questions of interpretation of EU law, the Court of Cassation made a reference to the CJEU. The CJEU was asked to determine whether national courts in the EU could treat an arbitral award as final and binding – effectively immune from further scrutiny – when such award makes findings on questions of EU law but has not been reviewed by a court capable of referring questions to the CJEU. 

CJEU 

In short, the CJEU’s answer was no.

The CJEU drew a clear distinction between voluntary and mandatory (or “imposed”) arbitration. In the context of international sports associations and their members, arbitration is rarely a matter of true party autonomy. Clubs and athletes must accept the jurisdiction of the CAS as a condition of participation in various organised sports, including football. The Court recognised that this “vertical” structure, where powerful governing bodies impose arbitration on a broad and indeterminate group of individuals, is fundamentally different from the “horizontal” relationships typical of commercial arbitration.

The Court held that, while recourse to arbitration can serve legitimate objectives in this context – such as ensuring uniformity and consistency in the application of sporting rules – this autonomy must not come at the expense of EU national courts of jurisdiction being able to scrutinise whether fundamental rights conferred in accordance with EU public policy (such as competition law and the freedom of movement) have been upheld. The judgment included keys points.

• The compulsory nature of vertical sports arbitration means that individuals cannot be deemed to have freely waived their right to effective judicial protection.
• That means that, where a dispute is linked to the practice of a professional sport, or the pursuit of sport as an economic activity, in the EU, an EU national court cannot be precluded from reviewing the consistency of an arbitral award with principles of EU public policy. 
• The CAS award in Seraing’s case had been reviewed by the Swiss Federal Supreme Court (the default seat of CAS arbitrations being Lausanne, Switzerland). As Switzerland is not an EU Member State, that court cannot make references to the CJEU. Accordingly, the Belgian courts who would, absent the arbitration agreement, have jurisdiction over the subject matter of the dispute and who can make references to the CJEU, retain the ability to review the CAS award. 
• The review of such arbitral awards by EU national courts need not be a full rehearing, but it must allow national courts to assess whether the award is consistent with EU law, and to grant effective remedies – including damages and interim relief – where necessary. 

The CJEU was clear: “It is essential that recourse to arbitration does not undermine the rights and freedoms that the fundamental rules of EU law guarantee athletes, clubs and, more broadly, any other person practising a professional sport or pursuing an economic activity linked to that sport." The Court further stated that “the awards made by the CAS must be amenable to effective judicial review,” and that “the authority of res judicata cannot be conferred on such an award unless its consistency with EU public policy has first been subject to effective review by a court or tribunal of a Member State.”

Implications

Seraing’s circumstances are specific and the judgment is technical, but it has a number of implications for sporting governing bodies, team owners, directors and investors, and players. 

• Governing bodies for professional sports can no longer rely on the finality of CAS decisions in non-EU seated arbitrations to insulate themselves from EU law challenges. Member States’ national courts of jurisdiction must be able to review awards for compliance with EU public policy. Some sporting bodies already provide for arbitrations to be seated in the EU and therefore directly subject to review by national courts (according to the relevant national law concerning the review of arbitral awards). Indeed, in 2024 UEFA introduced the possibility of having a CAS arbitration seated in Dublin for disputes relating to its Authorisation Rules, which would enable review of the award by the Irish courts and hence the CJEU. It is possible that becomes more common as a result of the ruling in Seraing, as governing bodies seek to avoid parallel legal proceedings within and outside the EU. 
• Individuals and organisations affected by non-EU seated CAS arbitral awards now have another potential means of challenging awards if they engage matters of EU public policy by seeking redress from courts in the EU with jurisdiction over their disputes. This is likely to increase the time and cost of resolving such disputes as awards which would otherwise have been treated as final are exposed to an additional layer of review. It seems likely that more claims before CAS (and potentially other arbitrations arising from vertical arbitration agreements) will be presented as engaging fundamental principles of EU law to seek to take advantage of this. 
• The judgment stops short of defining a single EU-wide standard for what level of review by national courts is sufficient. It says simply that courts must be able to review the relevant EU principles, apply them to the case at hand, and draw “all appropriate legal conclusions”. This may allow for diverging practices among national courts and a fragmentation in its implementation, together with future challenges as to whether the review mechanism offered in particular Member States is adequate. 
• The judgment carefully distinguishes sports arbitration from voluntary or horizontal commercial arbitration, indicating that the ruling should not, in theory, affect the broader world of commercial arbitration.

In England & Wales, given the UK is no longer a Member State, EU law and public policy do not apply, and disputes are not referable to the CJEU (rather, English arbitrations are subject to supervision by the English courts pursuant to the Arbitration Act). Further, most sports arbitral agreements in England & Wales preclude the type of enhanced review advocated by the CJEU. Typically, there is no right to appeal an arbitral award on a point of law, as sports associations often exclude such review in their rules. 

In any event, it follows from the decision in Seraing that there is now a risk that an EU national court with jurisdiction over a dispute would not treat as final, and would be prepared to conduct its own review of, an English sports arbitration award which engages matters of EU public policy – even if that award had already been the subject of an Arbitration Act review by the English courts. The CJEU’s judgment suggests the situation would be the same even if the award in question were non-arbitral and subject to the English court’s Bradley v The Jockey Club supervisory jurisdiction over disciplinary bodies. In both scenarios, there is therefore the risk of protracted (and expensive) parallel legal proceedings if the subject matter of the dispute engages fundamental principles of EU law. That risk is material given that speed and finality of outcome is often imperative in sporting disputes.