Legal practical limits of the UEFA financial sustainibility regulations. Evaluation of the UEFA FSR under EU law ans its capacity to protect competitiveness

Football is special, inherently different from other industries. That is what UEFA, a private organisation with the regulatory monopoly over European continental football, argues whenever it implements its regulations. One of these regulations are the new UEFA Financial Sustainability Regulations (FSR), the successor of Financial Fair Play, aimed to protect the financial stability and competitive balance within European football. But they also carry various restrictive effects for both clubs and players and might infringe EU competition law as well as certain EU freedoms. Nonetheless, any infringement might be exempted or justified under one of the doctrines developed and/or applied by the ECJ. After establishing the applicability of EU law to sports, this thesis will therefore - as its primary objective - evaluate the compatibility of the UEFA FSR with EU law. During the course of finding this answer, this thesis will also explore the general nature of lex sportiva, the tension between private and public regulation of European football, the special characteristics of sport and the evolution of the ECJ sports case law. Besides the legal evaluation, this thesis will also offer a practical assessment of the effectiveness of the current regulatory approaches with regard to the competitiveness problems that are present in European football - and aims to develop proposals for additional approaches by UEFA and by the EU itself.