Sports law in Lebanon is not in favour of the field’s development on a professional level. Sports jurisdictions are crucial to performance, as demonstrated by the 1995 Bosman ruling that further cemented the domination of European football worldwide.
Law plays a major role in sports. The development of international sports has always been made possible by relevant laws that paved the way for the professionalization of it and the financial viability of clubs and organizations alike.
The Lebanese judicial system is lagging far behind. Nowadays, not all sports clubs have the right to be registered as commercial companies, and can only obtain legal status as associations. Such a constraint makes budget planning and sports strategizing more difficult. In his interview with Ici Beyrouth, attorney-at-law Ralph Charbel, expert in international sports law and editor of Middle East Sports Law, explains that “the structure of clubs in Lebanon is in dire need of development in order to become sustainable. Associations are non-profitable by definition. Investing in sports will thus generate no profit whatsoever.”
Laws, crucial to the development of sports
Internationally, when it comes to football (the most popular sport on the planet), the best example of the importance of laws in sports would be the 1995 Bosman ruling. Since then, the balance of power between European and South American teams in the World Cup tilted in favour of the former.
The Bosman ruling was the result of a feud between Belgian footballer Jean-Marc Bosman and his club, RFC Liège. In 1990, Bosman wanted to quit, but changing clubs then was not as simple as it is today: even if a player’s contract was nearing its end, the buying club had to pay an extra sum to have them enrol. Dunkerque, a French Ligue 2 club, wanted to recruit Bosman, but the sum required by RFC Liège was too high, which broke the deal. The Belgian midfielder filed a complaint before the Court of Justice of the European Union and, on December 15th, 1995, he won the trial, and the famous Bosman ruling was born. It stipulated that players are free to join the club of their choosing at the end of their contract. They could also change clubs even before the contract’s expiry date, provided that the buying club pays a release provision. As a result, European clubs were no longer limited to a European Union player cap.
Since the Bosman ruling was made, Europeans won 5 of the 6 World Cups played (83%), whereas before the ruling itself, they were only crowned champions 7 times out of 15 (47%). The exposure of the best European players of all nations ended up reinforcing the big nations’ best players, which made a country like France win the World Cup for the first time, in 1998, considering that the majority of its star players didn’t train in France, but in the biggest European clubs. Moreover, European underdogs like Croatia and Belgium have made a quantum leap, ranking second and third in the last World Cup, mostly due to the fact that their best players can lawfully join leading European clubs and are no longer limited to their countries’ relatively weak local championships. Hence, by the time the 2018 World Cup was played, most Belgian nationals were competing in the English Premier League, one of the best – if not the best – European championships.
Judging from the Europeans’ success following the ruling, one may wonder why Arab sports institutions don’t work towards developing a similar law aimed at facilitating the transfer of the region’s players. When asked about it by Ici Beyrouth, attorney-at-law Ralph Charbel replied: “it would be a good initiative on an Arab league level. If a team’s Arab players quota is no longer counted as part of its foreign players quota, the level of athleticism will increase.”
Regardless of the lack of vision and legal coordination needed to develop the sport in the Arab world, Lebanon is still trailing in different aspects of the law, such as the unilateral nullification of contracts by clubs or athletes. Ralph Charbel explains that “in theory, the process of nullification is not a simple one. A club or athlete nullifying a contract without proper justification is liable to a heavy penalty. But in practice, very few professional athletes resort to sports law specialists. For that reason, numerous cases of unlawful professional sports contracts nullifications have been recorded, and no legal action was ever taken.”