Governing bodies have significant autonomy in the organisation of professional sport in the EU, a situation now … supported by Article 165 TFEU. However the post‐Lisbon competence for sport does not grant any exemption for practices that … response to an inherent need in that sport. The football ‘transfer system’ has been the subject of a series of EU law …

As early as the seventies the sports authorities in Europe started a campaign in order to achieve the recognition of a … sporting exemption from the European rules. In their view the whole of the sporting activity containing also sports rules … in many different sports related cases in order to exclude some areas of the sports sector from the European Internal …