WAYS TO RESOLVE SPORTS DISPUTES: SPECIFIC FEATURES

Abstract

The article is devoted to the analysis of possible ways to resolve sports disputes, determining their features. It is noted that the peculiarities of consideration of sports disputes in court are due, in the first place, special nature of sports-legal relations, namely, that this group of relations governed by the norms of various branches of law, in particular civil, labor, economic, land, administrative and others. Such groups of litigation such as civil, economic, administrative, and criminals are analyzed. As a result of the analysis made, it is concluded that in order of civil proceedings, the largest group of sports disputes is considered. Sports civil disputes may concern disputes about invalidation or termination of training agreements or contracts between athletes and professional clubs, collection of unpaid wages, refuting inaccurate information, prohibition of illegal use of a trademark, retransmission of sports events, etc. The next fairly widespread sports dispute group is economic disputes, in particular: disputes about invalidation or termination of sports complexes, organization and implementation of matches, providing technical or title sponsorship, extracting counterfeit products containing emblems of a professional club or other registered trademarks, etc. Also, this group includes bankruptcy of sports subjects. The group of sports administrative disputes, which are specific and often occurring in practice, are analyzed. This dispute group may include disputes regarding the appeal of decisions, actions, or inactivity of state authorities or local self-government bodies or their officials relating to the sphere of sports, collecting tax debt, transfer of property to tax collateral and others. Sports criminal disputes are the least widespread, which include disputes concerning tax evasion, fees or other mandatory payments, occupying fictitious entrepreneurship, bribery of an enterprise, institution, organization, proposal or provision of unlawful benefit officials, etc. It is concluded that the courts in solving sports disputes should be guided solely by the norms of current legislation, rather than regulations of professional sports organizations, which in practice causes a greater interest of subjects of sports relations to extrajudicial ways to resolve sports disputes. The use of extrajudicial dispute solutions is due to the speed and confidentiality of their consideration, lower cost compared to litigation, as well as the real execution by the parties to a substantive sports dispute. These ways to resolve sports disputes include negotiations of the parties, mediation, an independent expert opinion, arbitration, the dispute to the Ombudsman.