ABSTRACT
Previous chapters have illustrated that, with a handful of situations motivated by the Commission’s involvement in the wake of Bosman, the impact of sports’ unions in the EU has not been remotely comparable to that of their North American counterparts and there has been precious little engagement with alternative forms of dispute resolution save for those provided by the CAS and the FIFA DRC. The principal exceptions to the general rule concern the activities of professional football unions of some member states (Walters, 2004; Harding 1998), the work of its umbrella organisation FIFPro (which coordinates the activities of those unions that represent over 50,000 football players worldwide) and, finally, the increasing involvement of unions in other sports usually under the auspices of EU Athletes which represents and assists independent athletes’ associations and athletes’ unions (www.euathletes.org). Although other sports have looked to FIFPro and the more successful football unions in particular member states as a model they could potentially follow, in most team sports where there is a traditional employer-employee relationship there is little history of activism by unions that can be properly described as ‘independent’ of either the state or the sport’s governing bodies (Girginov, 2001; Kustec Lipicer and McArdle, 2012). In those individual sports where athletes contract their services to the organisers of particular events – golf or tennis, for example – there is even less of a history of collective action to promote players’ interests, although EU Athletes is an example of attempts to promote a more sophisticated model of athletes’ representation.
