Meca-Medina Twenty years on: Constitutional lessons and Future Challenges

On 18 July 2006, in Meca-Medina and Majcen v Commission,1 the Court of Justice held that the anti-doping rules of the International Olympic Committee, although sport-specific in their content, were not for that reason removed from the scope of Article 101 TFEU. The finding itself was narrow: a set of thresholds for nandrolone, adopted by a sports federation, had to be assessed under competition law like any other decision of an association of undertakings, and could escape the prohibition only if its restrictive effects were inherent in a legitimate objective and proportionate to it. Twenty years later, that narrow finding has become the working method by which the Court tests the regulatory power of sports governing bodies across fields their drafters in 2006 had no reason to anticipate: the review of disciplinary sanctions, the processing of personal data, the financial governance of clubs in crisis, and the position of intermediaries who are not even members of the federation whose rules bind them.