A Principal-Agent perspective on good governance in international sports. The European Union as ex-post control mechanism

Focusing on the case of European professional football, this doctoral thesis demonstrates that a Principal-Agent (PA) approach is especially suited to analyse the role of the European Union (EU) in achieving good governance in international sports: the relation between the EU and international sport is, in essence, characterised by a tension between the large autonomy international sport organisations have enjoyed for a very long time and control on these organisations by the EU. We conceptualise football stakeholders and national public authorities as principals, Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) and Union Européenne de Football Association (UEFA) as agents, and the EU institutions in terms of control, namely as a complex control mechanism. We assert that principals have two routes they can follow in order to control agency behaviour: the ‘EU law’ route, which has been the most important route since its introduction in 1974, and the ‘EU sports policy’ route, which is still in a developing stage. Analysing both routes on the basis of PA theory, we assess their general limits and opportunities as well as their potential influence on achieving good governance. The conclusion is then drawn that the ‘EU sports policy’ route holds the best prospects for achieving good governance in international sports, provided it can overcome certain potential restraints, namely questionable effectiveness, preference heterogeneity issues and lack of transparency and accountability . Finally, we demonstrate that the limits of the EU sports policy route can be overcome by increasing both the ‘shadow of hierarchy’ and ‘throughput legitimacy’. The shadow of hierarchy is formed by the fear from FIFA and UEFA of jurisprudence by the Court of Justice of the European Union, regulatory practice by the European Commission and indirect regulation by the EU. Throughput legitimacy points at the numerous ways in which policy processes work in order to ensure the accountability of those engaged in decision making, the transparency of the information and the inclusiveness and openness to civil society.Our contribution to PA literature is that we define and explore the EU as a complex control mechanism for principals, with multiple actors (the European Council, the Council of the EU, the European Parliament and the European Commission) and multiple mechanisms (public and private enforcement, and steering). Our PA-inspired analysis also demonstrates that existing attempts in the literature to theorise the role of the EU in sport governance are too narrow since they focus on the regulatory aspect of EU intervention in sport.