Over the past 20, years a number of changes have occurred in the European sports environment that will undoubtedly lead to sig-nificant developments in the years to come. Here we underline two of the most significant of these changes. The first is the emer-gence of private bodies from outside the world of sport. These new actors operate principally according to commercial logic and, although to date they have had most impact in ‘classical’
professional sport, they are starting to reach the world of elite sport. The second phenomenon is in part an explanation of the emergence of these new actors. Here we are referring to the extraordinary growth in interest in sport over the course of the past 20 years. Rising living standards, growth in leisure time, and technological progress, particularly in the media, are at the roots of this phenomenon. Faced with this increase in demand for sport, the supply of sport has increased, and considerably so.
Elite sport may well be primarily about sports competition, but by the same token it has also become the focus of intense economic competition amongst new and old actors. The trend is most notable between, on the one hand, the ‘historical’ actors such as sports federations and, on the other, the more recently arrived
private operators. But the trend can also be seen within the ‘his-torical’ sports movement itself, in conflict between the different levels of the hierarchy of France’s sports organisations.
Conflict number 1: Between governing bodies within the same sport over ‘market shares’ in time; in particular the competition between athletes’ time spent in national team competitions in relation to their employers’ duties and rights regarding insurance and finan-cial indemnities.
Numerous questions are raised under this point: insurance cover; the distribution of income; and in time, the appropriate significance granted to different types of competition over the course of the annual sporting calendar. The first of these ques-tions concerns elite athletes’ insurance coverage when compet-ing for their national team. The athlete’s club is collectively responsible under the regulations governed by the federations to insure the players made available for the entirety of the inter-national competitions in which the inter-national team is participat-ing. This question became an issue in professional sport in 1997 when Rome’s Lazio football club demanded that the Italian football federation pay the sum of €6.3 million following an injury sustained by one of Lazio’s players, Alessandro Nesta, during a period when Nesta had been made available to the Italian national squad. In September 1998, the club asked to be reimbursed the €3 million transfer fee it had paid for a player to replace Nesta, as well as the €29 million for this player’s salary, and the €1 million that the club had paid to Nesta when he was not able to play for them.
In March 1997, Barcelona FC had invoked the Bosman ruling in order to avoid making its players available to their national teams. The University of Saragossa issued a statement critical of the club’s action, stating that ‘The obligation of the players to make themselves available to their national team cannot be deemed a barrier to the free movement of workers, in that the status of an international player is neither permanent nor immutable.’ Ten years later came the Oulmers affair. This was the case of a player for Charleroi (Belgium), Abdelmajd Oulmers, who was injured while playing for Morocco in a friendly inter-national, and whose club demanded substantial financial com-pensation from the federation in question (the world football governing body, International Football Federation (FIFA)). The case marked a clear departure in terms of rulings potentially favourable to the clubs.
In the case of basketball, the participation of Tarik Abdul-Wahad in the 2001 World Championships had raised a similar problem for the FFBB (the French Basketball Federation – Fédération française de basketball). The FFBB is the biggest European
basketball federation, with over 450,000 members – but the player had just signed a contract for seven seasons with the NBA (National Basketball Association). Had he sustained an injury playing for the French national team which subsequently made him unavailable to play in the United States, the compensation due to the NBA would have been in the order of €75,000 for each match missed during the season. Multiplied by 82 matches per season, and by 7 years, this would have amounted to a huge fig-ure which eventually brought the two bodies, the NBA and the FFBB, to an agreement to share the costs. While these examples clearly pertain first and foremost to team sports, it is not hard to imagine a similar scenario in individual sports where the athletes answer to private bodies (see above).
Furthermore, we can envisage two other potential issues likely to arise. The first is that both athletes and their employers, in some cases clubs turned private companies, may well demand compensation when the athlete is selected for their national team, injury or no injury. Indeed, in the case of athletes selected for the national team who receive bonuses, the question arises as to what happens to their salary, in these cases paid by a private company (Bayle and Durand, 2000). The significant growth in the financial implications of sporting events associ-ated with the traditional organising bodies (such as the Inter-national Rugby Board (IRB) in rugby; FIFA and Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) in football; the French Tennis Federation (FFT) in the case of Roland Garros) effectively opens the door to significant demands on the part of the employers who have released their best talent for selection by the national team. It will become harder and harder to justify the notion that competitions generating such vast financial income are unable (or unwilling) to offer substantial compensation to the private bodies who provide the athletes and pay their salaries. This is already a sensitive area in those sports readily acknowledged to be ‘professional’, and is becoming equally so in disciplines hitherto considered as having ‘amateur’ status.
In this context, the arrival on the French elite sport scene of Group Lagardère, a highly influential business in European industry and media,6had already marked a turning point. Part of the group, ‘Team Lagardère’, presents itself as an ‘innovative research platform working for the sporting elite’ (http://www.
teamlagardere.com/va/), offering cutting-edge technical sup-port to certain elite athletes in targeted disciplines. Thus, agree-ments have been reached with the national federations for tennis table, athletics, rugby (the physical preparation of the members of the French national team); Paris Judo Club; and contracts signed with 19 professional tennis players. On the face of it, this
is not a development that automatically conflicts with the activ-ities of the traditional sports federations in France. However, Lagardère also proposes to find partners who will sponsor the athletes in its team, and in this respect demonstrates that its ambitions go beyond its initial objectives of providing technical and technological expertise. The link between Team Lagardère and its parent media group provides a glimpse of the sort of vertical integration that might come to characterise sports structures in the future. For example, if the media arm of Lagardère was to buy the French events rights for tennis – or even to take over certain competitions in their entirety – what would stop the group from also ensuring that the sporting stars of Team Lagardère were guaranteed participation in the events in question?
This approach is typified by Team Lagardère’s buyout of Sportfive (European leader in sports marketing) for the sum of
€865 million; in 2005 Sportfive had an annual turnover of €550 million and has signed contracts with 270 clubs, including the FFF (French Football Federation) and the Olympique Lyonnais Football Club. Team Lagardère has also bought up Newsweb, a leading sports content website; it owns 25 per cent of Amaury, the sports organisation company which owns the sports newspaper L’Equipe Magazine as well as events such as the Tour de France and the Paris–Dakar rally. Lagardère has a minority holding in the TV channel Canal which owns football and professional rugby TV rights. This private operator is thus attempting to bring together under one roof TV/audiovisual rights, the management of ath-letes’ careers, and the organisation of sporting events. In late 2006, it bought the Racing Club de France, the biggest European all-sports club (18 different all-sports sections and 20,000 members).
Leading figures in France’s sports movement are wary of the pos-sible excesses of such an exclusively commercial strategy. Arnaud Lagardère himself is open about his strategy, stating in an inter-view with L’Equipe Magazine on 16 December 2006 that ‘I am not doing this because I like sport, but because it is important that the Lagardère group expands its business.
The signing in March 2007 of a partnership contract between the French swimmer Laure Manaudou and the Artemis group (itself part of the Pinault finance conglomerate) is part of a rather different phenomenon. In this case, Artemis will pay the swimmer €1 million per year for five seasons without, it would appear, any explicit guarantees in return. According to Artemis, their involvement is a form of sponsorship akin to its patronage of the contemporary arts. Manaudou already has contracts with Aréna, Electricité de France, LastMinute.com, the luxury goods firm Lancel, Sporever, and the Société de bains de mer de Monaco
(operator of luxury hotels, casinos, and spas in Monte Carlo).
Given these multiple contractual, commercial obligations, future conflicts of interest regarding the swimmer’s availability for certain sporting events cannot be ruled out.
Above and beyond the matter of financial flows and trans-actions, therefore, the question of the sporting calendar will inevitably raise its head. It is only a matter of time before clashes of interest occur over ‘ownership’ of the athletes’ time, with the sporting calendar potentially being carved up between the different bodies involved in organising the competitions.
The sports federations on the one hand and the private organ-isations on the other may well end up disagreeing over when an athlete is available. We could even envisage the different organisations – clubs, national teams, and national, regional, and world organising bodies – keeping a tally of the number of dates that accrue to each.
Ice hockey and basketball illustrate perfectly what the future might hold in these respects. The major North American leagues, the National Hockey League (NHL) and the NBA, respectively, are and always have been private bodies that have complete discretion over whether or not to release players for the Olympics, World and European Championships. In 1998, for example, the NHL had rearranged its own calendar to fit with the Nagano Winter Olympic Games, so that for the first time ever, the Olympic tournament was able to bring together all the world’s elite ice hockey players. The Olympic ice hockey event, however, made very little impact on the professional championship, with the consequence that in the 2002 Salt Lake City Games, the Olympics merely represented a week’s break in the NHL’s Stanley Cup. The Cup’s organisers, moreover, let it be known that they only agreed to the interruption of their tournament because the Olympics were also being held on the North American continent. The very next day after the Olympic final (between Canada and the United States), the players resumed their club competition in the NHL.
This question of the sporting calendar is all the more crucial now that the calendar is so overloaded, with the result that even by staggering competitions across the year, the problem of the athletes’ preparation is far from resolved. In the case of swimming, for example, the participation by top athletes in the French Championships is at the express request of the swim-ming federation which understandably wishes to maintain the profile of the competitions for which it is responsible. Yet not only do the swimming coaches on occasion view the champi-onships as of secondary importance; so do some of the sponsors and other commercial partners of the swimmers, with the result
that swimmers are either absent or put in a merely symbolic appearance. Furthermore, the top athletes are heavily in demand to make public relations appearances to which they are contractually obligated and which pay extremely well, but which are costly of their time. The federations have no signifi-cant sanctions to bring to bear on individual athletes in these one-to-one negotiations, and so certain national competitions could well find themselves deprived of the best athletes who will have chosen to earn their living elsewhere.
Where tennis is concerned, the time spent by athletes in their national teams in competition for the Davis Cup and the Fed Cup (known as the Federation Cup until 1995) is seen by certain players themselves as interruptions in the only sporting calen-dar which actually matters, namely the tournament circuit, where rankings are everything. Only those federations in a position to offer substantial financial bonuses manage to per-suade the best players to participate in their competitions. The Athletics League, created in 2007 by the French federation in partnership with Lagardère, is now attempting to restructure the calendar by offering players guaranteed payments if they agree to compete in four of the seven annual meets that are planned for the sport.
Conflict number 2: Between federations and governments and between governments, over the definition of ‘sporting nationalities’.
The second point of tension between the bodies involved in the organisation and development of elite sport concerns the definition of ‘sporting nationalities’. The organising principle of sport in Europe has, since its beginnings, been nationality.
The Olympic Charter may well stipulate that the Games are a competition between athletes and not between nations, but it did not take long for the ambassadors of Olympic values in their respective countries to become the ambassadors of their country within the Olympic movement.
The political importance accorded to sports performances soon raised the stakes of international sports competitions. One side-effect for several decades has been for rich countries to drain poor countries of their best sporting talent. France has not been immune to these pressures, notably in athletics and weightlifting. These powerful countries fall over themselves to attract the best athletes, at best by supporting their sports development within the structures available in their country of origin, at worst by poaching them at an advanced stage in their sports careers. Since the Sydney Olympics, the trend for athletes to seek naturalisation in another country for their personal, economic gain has risen; the highly symbolic and memorable image of this phenomenon being the sight of the six
Bulgarian weightlifters parading the Qatar flag following a fast-track naturalisation process, and the exchange of some million dollars.
Nowadays, each international federation sets its own condi-tions for the eligibility of its athletes, but in all cases the athlete must have lived for a certain period of time in the host country, and must have been eligible for selection in the ‘sending’ coun-try. For rugby, selection for the national team does not depend on political nationality, but on the length of time the athlete has been resident in the country in question. Thus, a South African player is a frequent member of the French national team and a number of players originating from the Pacific Islands are to be found lining up for the New Zealand All Blacks in international competitions. In a similar fashion, UEFA is currently consider-ing makconsider-ing clubs’ eligibility for European competition football dependent upon the presence in the squad of a significant num-ber of players (8 of 25) who are nationals in the sense of having been trained in the club (at least 4) or in a another club in the same country (the remaining 4).
The international governing bodies find themselves on a knife-edge in these respects, since there are serious moral objec-tions against discriminating between citizens of the same coun-try on the grounds of their nationality, however recently citizenship was granted. To date, no serious complaint has made it all the way to the courtroom, but the number of litigation disputes is multiplying nevertheless. The related problem of nationality with regard to clubs participating in competitions deemed hitherto as strictly ‘national’, or using sports facilities that must be in their own country, will inevitably also rear its head. Certain top clubs have already requested the right to take part in competitions organised in third countries, or to have access to play in stadiums outside their own country. At a time when internal European borders are becoming increas-ingly irrelevant, we can expect these various aspects of the problem of ‘sporting nationality’ to give rise to ever more seri-ous debates.
The French position on this issue is somewhat schizophrenic.
On the one hand, the very principle of a ‘market’ in the nation-ality of elite athletes is seen to go against the founding prin-ciples of sport. On the other hand, some French sports federations (athletics, weightlifting, gymnastics, figure skating, short track speed skating, and badminton) do not hesitate in practice to look abroad to recruit potential medallists in order to enhance the international ranking of their sport, which is the key factor determining the partnership between the French government and its sports federations.
Conflict number 3: Between athletes, employers, and federations over rights ownership.
Elite sport today serves significant commercial purposes.
Sports events can now be viewed remotely in real-time, or virtu-ally real-time – via live telephone links, for example. Conversely, coverage of these events is archived and can be viewed long after the competition itself. These are controversial develop-ments, since they pose the question of ownership of the rights to sports events and competitions. Producers of sports video games who in any way personalise their product – featuring identifiable players or organisations, real-life stadiums or spon-sors, or a ball that is identical to the original – find themselves dealing with any number of rights-holders; yet the payment of royalties in such a complex situation is far from easy. Several years ago, a number of British footballers claimed the rights over goals they scored that were played and replayed as part of the introductory sequence of a TV programme about football!
Their argument was that the broadcaster only had the right to play the footage in the form of highlights of the game itself, not as archive material disconnected from the game, that is, show-ing the ‘work’, as the claimants described their goal sequence.
The basic question here is that of the ownership of the rights to sports events at the time of the event itself and thereafter. In the case of team sports, French law has recently specified how these rights are to be divided between the clubs and the leagues.
Technological progress has complicated the matter even more. Clubs are claiming rights, for example, over the
Technological progress has complicated the matter even more. Clubs are claiming rights, for example, over the