EU ANTITRUST: HOT TOPICS & NEXT STEPS

EU ANTITRUST: HOT TOPICS & NEXT STEPS 2022

Prague, Czechia

a new and interesting angle from which to view the EU’s policy on sport, and the relationships between global actors, the Commission, UEFA, Member States, and professional football clubs. The area also makes visible a dynamic interaction of interests, engaging the EU internal market, the societal role of sport, UEFA financial fair play, and Member State autonomy (Craven, 2014, pp. 205–217). Public authorities’ support for sport is an excellent example of the interpenetration of two traditionally perceived branches: public law and private law. It is argued in the literature that these two branches interpenetrate each other. The support instruments used and the legal measures used to grant support are of an unusual nature–they combine elements characteristic of private law (equality of parties) and public law (sovereignty). Scientists who are part of the research on the border law present positions in favor of a departure (or at least wide changes) from the classical division of branches of law into public law and private law. 2.1 Research problems The basic research problem is the attempt to answer the question whether the support granted by public authorities to sports clubs constitute unlawful state aid and whether this aid should be returned as unacceptable (incompatible with the internal market of the European Union). The admissibility of the aid was subjected to detailed tests, taking into account the normative basis of its granting. The conducted research was aimed at analyzing the mechanisms, legal support instruments, and the scale of support. The fundamental question therefore comes down to whether the state aid granted to sports clubs meets the criteria of legality, purposefulness, and proportionality provided for in legal regulations at the EU level, and whether the support granted to sports clubs constitutes unlawful state aid referred to in Article 107 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. The preliminary assumptions made show that such support in fact (in most cases, in particular regarding professional sports clubs) constitutes illegal state aid referred to in the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. It should also be noted that the described topic brings together hybrid legal solutions–both in the field of public law and private law. Thus, the second important research problem is to determine whether the legal solutions used in the support of sports clubs by public authorities constitute an example of legal solutions from the border law (where the branches of public law and private law meet). It is a topic that raises a lot of controversy both in the doctrine and in the practice of applying the law – it carries significant consequences, which only emphasizes the importance of the problem. 2. Problem Formulation and Methodology

412