Sports Law after Entry into Force of the Lisbon Treaty: What's Changed?

For scholars is well-known how sport has been essentially indifferent for European Law, since it is ascribable to the private sphere of citizens where public legal systems ordinarily don’t interfere, if not to settle emerging conflicts or to guarantee interests, that have a general nature.In the European Union this indifference is further stressed by its purely economic genesis: an approach that seems to be confirmed by various European judgments, whose arguments tended to identify the specificity of sport, specificity that receded when sport intersected spheres and spaces that are typically economic and, therefore, pertaining to the EU (especially for that regards the free movement of goods and workers).The long process of EU reform, that ended with the entry into force of the Treaty of Lisbon, reverses this trend: in fact the sport entered within the EU competences, although in a subsidiary perspective, inducing a series of changes, both at the institutional and at the regulatory level.I wonder about the real extent of such changes: if from a legal theoretical point of view seems to have changed much, I wonder what is the real status of sport and lex sportiva in the EU as redesigned by the Lisbon Treaty. A lot of fuss about nothing? Or something has really changed?[...]