Intermediari e calciomercato: l'impatto del diritto della concorrenza sui nuovi regolamenti Fifa alla luce della specificità dello sport

In the last decade the economic turnover generated by football players' transfers has skyrocketed. Football transfers market has obtained a huge economic relevance, attracting outsiders with the aim of obtaining part of the economic rents produced by this market. Players' agents (now intermediaries) have become year by year more involved in the representation of football firms during the transfers of players; simultaneously, their remuneration per single transfer has increased steadily. Meanwhile, new market practices have developed, as the so-called Third-Party Ownership, raising concerns about their regulation. Those developments of the market have constrained the FIFA to intervene with a set of new rules regarding players' agents and Third-Party Ownership, trying to guarantee the efficiency of the market and to promote the competitive balance between football clubs. Nevertheless, the new FIFA Regulations have been strongly criticized and it has been argued that they could infringe EU Competition Law rules. The aim of the work is to analyse such contentious regulations and the relevant market practices, in order to assess their compliance with EU Competition Law.