Sports Lawyer in the Spotlight: Benoit Keane

For this edition of Sports Lawyer In The Spotlight, we interviewed Benoît Keane, an Irish lawyer based in Brussels who has become one of Europe’s foremost specialists in the application of EU law to sport.

Benoît practises through Keane Legal, the boutique he founded in 2012, and is a consultant to Northridge Law LLP. He is qualified across three jurisdictions, as a Solicitor-Advocate of England and Wales, an Avocat of the Brussels Bar, and a Solicitor of Ireland. He read law at University College Cork before taking a Master’s in European Law at the College of Europe in Bruges.

He acts in cases before the European Commission, the EU Courts and the Court of Arbitration for Sport, where he has appeared both as counsel and as a legal expert. He has been involved in many of the landmark EU and competition law cases in sport, notably representing UEFA in the European Super League case before the Court of Justice, acting for FIFA in the litigation over its football agent regulations, and appearing in the RFC Seraing^[1] case on the status of CAS awards within the EU legal order. In addition to acting on regulatory issues, he advises on the application of competition law to the commercial activities of sports organisers, such as the collective selling of media rights.  Legal directories describe him as a worldwide leading expert in sports-related EU law and as a standout name for the application of competition law to sport.

Benoît is also an Editorial Board member at LawInSport.

We spoke with Benoît in September 2026. We hope you enjoy the interview as much as we did.

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