Sports Disputes & Disciplinary Proceedings – Annual Review 2025/26
Welcome to the Disputes and Disciplinary Proceedings chapter of LawInSport’s Annual Review 2025/26. Sports disputes and disciplinary proceedings continued to occupy the mainstream in 2025, continuing into 2026. Historically, buzzwords such as “130 charges”, “PSR” and “Diarra” would have resonated with a limited section of the sports (and indeed legal) community. Today, they have become more commonplace in the general public’s stream of consciousness.
This chapter draws together the disputes and decisions that defined the year. Five themes run through it: the Premier League’s most consequential regulatory actions, from the Manchester City “130 charges” verdict and Chelsea’s sanction agreements to the move from PSR to a new financial system; the rapid evolution of multi‑club ownership and the limits of blind‑trust workarounds; major‑event jurisprudence including the still‑unresolved AFCON 2026 final; the European courts’ growing willingness to address the future of sports governance through the Diarra and Seraing judgements and the FFAR opinion; and the increasingly fraught law of sex eligibility, culminating in the IOC’s March 2026 policy on the female category. Taken together, they mark a year in which the boundary between traditional sporting autonomy and ordinary law has continued to narrow.
Chapter Overview
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Written by
Rustam Sethna
Justin Humphries
Justin is a Associate at Mills & Reeve with a keen interest in the intersection between law and sport. Having completed a Masters in International Sports Law from ISDE (Madrid, 2019), Justin then worked at UK Anti-Doping in the Case Management team and within the Department for Digital, Culture Media and Sport before joining Mills & Reeve.
Mariona Arisa Ventura
Maria is a Paralegal at Mills & Reeve in the Sports and Entertainment department in London. She is a Spanish qualified lawyer with a strong international background and a strong interest in international and European law, competition law, and sports law.
