Global regulator

The challenges

For years, sport has largely been allowed to regulate itself. This approach has failed to prevent and counter crime and corruption for several reasons:

• Sport’s self-regulation involves an inherent conflict of interest as each sport governing body must both nurture its commercial interests and simultaneously protect the integrity of sport.
• The governance structures in sport by and large lack separation between the commercial, political, investigative, and judicial powers.
• The blurred and permeable boundaries between sport and society complicate jurisdiction over sports-related issues, making it difficult to determine which authority is responsible for and able to enforce regulations. 

ClearingSport’s assessment 

There is significant variation in both the willingness and ability to enforce criminal laws and sports regulations when it comes to addressing integrity issues in sport. 

The Olympic movement has long recognised that the right to autonomy must be earned through good governance. However, the self-regulation of sport and the accompanying inherent conflicts of interest have led to insufficient and ineffective enforcement. Despite a recent push for the application of good governance standards across sport, we observe that – in reality – those standards are not consistently enforced. 

Sport’s claim for unlimited autonomy has furthermore deterred actors from outside sport from intervening in sport. Public authorities often avoid challenging sports autonomy for several reasons, including concerns about repercussions from sport, public backlash from sports fans or from those who benefit from sport’s commercial success. These are some of the reasons why public authorities neither pass sport-specific laws, nor dedicate the necessary resources to oversight, resulting in minimal enforcement of globally accepted standards in the sports industry.

ClearingSport does not aim to remove the autonomy of sport. On the contrary, we aim to protect its autonomy from those sorts of abuse that undermine the legitimacy of sports governing bodies and their fundamental right to freedom of association.

The identified solution 

Establish a global regulator to monitor and enforce standards through compliance and sanctioning mechanisms.

ClearingSport finds that a new entity with clear separation of powers should also play the role of a global regulator. In cases where the agreed universal integrity standards, sport’s own regulations, or national and international laws are violated, the global regulator is mandated to ensure compliance or refer the case to relevant judicial authorities. 

Some mechanisms for the entity to ensure compliance could be:

• rewards for compliance, such as verification, audits, assurance of adherence, certificates of compliance, etc.
• measures that impose costs in cases of non-compliance, such as financial repercussions, exclusion from other benefits, reputational damage, publicly announcing investigative results, etc.
• resources to implement standards, such as capacity building, for relevant stakeholders, including those subject to the regulations within the global regulator’s jurisdiction