Toward a European Regulation on Sports Fraud? Legal Criticalities

Sports news of recent years tell us more and more often about sports fraud episodes, that darken other sports feats. Attempts to distort the course of competitions, reaching or not the wanted outcome, don’t seem to have borders of sports specialties or nationalities. It’s concretized a sort of democratic equality, because of involving various protagonists of sports competitions: a sort of democratic equality, perhaps never reached in any other field of sport. The awareness of the spread of this phenomenon provoked and still provokes alarm, not only at level of sports governance, but even at state level and/or international one: so the actions aimed at countering the diffusion of this phenomenon ended up to retrace the steps of what’s already experienced about the fight against doping, which is, moreover, a specific form of sports fraud, that acquired autonomous consistency, because of its spread. Nevertheless, it’s interesting to point how, contrary of what’s occurred in the case of doping, beyond a general and shared reprehension, in sports legal system it isn’t reached any uniformity for evaluation and regulation of the case, whose typification and relative sanctions show an extremely differentiated panorama. Once again, the onus of guiding the steps towards effective contrasting actions and, more importantly, uniform, is taken in an extra-sports area, particularly by the Council of Europe. In fact, the Council of Europe is dealt with sport many times, acknowledging it a special role, because of its specific pedagogical function. From here a special focus on a legislative policy in sport field, which has led to the issue of several recommendations and convention on sport; a special attention, that in the last years focused on sports fraud, which is the object of the Recommendation on promotion of the integrity of sport against manipulation of results, notably match-fixing (CM/Rec(2011)10), constituting the prelude to a next Convention on the matter. In this contribution I shall consider interesting points and problematic knots of such regulative approach, highlighting how it’s undoubtedly a fundamental starting point, but not sufficient, if not supported by the awareness by sports organizations of the need to face the matter in a coordinated and, as far as possible, uniform manner, similarly to what already experienced for doping. So, when a World Anti-Sports Fraud Agency? When a World Anti-Sports Fraud Code?