Sports regulation in the European Union: a new approach?

Abstract

In December 2000 in Nice, the European Council agreed to grant the social, educational and cultural functions of sport special status within the European Union's (EU) Treaty framework. Although the Nice Declaration on Sport does not commit the EU legally, it does represent a significant strengthening of the Declaration on Sport annexed to the 1997 Amsterdam Treaty. Coming just 6 years after the European Court of Justice's Bosman verdict effectively defined much sport as an economic activity, how can we explain the EU's apparent redefinition of sport? Why have changes in EU spor ts policy been confined to the regulatory side of EU involvement and not to the distributional elements? The application of a fused actor/institutions methodology for examining public policy change in the EU provides some answers.