Scholarlink

<p>The Saudi Public Investment Fund’s coordinated acquisition of four Saudi Pro League clubs, combined with transfer expenditure exceeding £800&#xa0;million in a single window, has exposed a structural collapse at the heart of global football governance: existing financial sustainability frameworks were designed to discipline clubs, not sovereign states. This paper advances a doctrinal argument in three movements. First, it maps the jurisdictional void within the global regulatory hierarchy from FIFA through the AFC to the SPL, demonstrating that UEFA’s Club Licensing and Financial Sustainability Regulations, widely regarded as the gold standard of financial control, are structurally inapplicable to sovereign actors deliberately operating outside their jurisdictional reach. Second, it anatomizes the legal mechanisms through which the PIF exploits this void: corporate separation, sovereign immunity doctrine, and systematic jurisdictional arbitrage between continental confederations operating under irreconcilably different regulatory baselines. Third, it evaluates the doctrinal limits of available reform, engaging critically with the Meca-Medina proportionality framework, the structural weaknesses of CAS enforcement architecture, and the fundamental inadequacy of lex sportiva as a regulatory response to loss-insensitive state capital. Against this diagnosis, the paper proposes a tripartite governance blueprint: mandatory sovereignty waivers embedded within FIFA’s transfer regulatory framework, strategic deployment of the EU Foreign Subsidies Regulation as an extraterritorial enforcement backstop, and a Reverse-Assurance Guarantee mechanism requiring sovereign beneficial owners to submit to independent financial oversight as a condition of participation in the global transfer market.</p>

错误：搜索内容不能为空，请输入英文关键词
错误：关键词超出字数限制，请精简
高级检索

Beyond the break-even rule: sovereign capital, jurisdictional arbitrage, and the structural inadequacy of football’s financial sustainability frameworks in the age of state-backed investment

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年4月24日

查看全文
  • Rawnak Miraj Ul Azam,
  • Ashiqur Rahman,
  • Kazi Tamrin Rashed,
  • Ishtiak Abdullah

摘要

The Saudi Public Investment Fund’s coordinated acquisition of four Saudi Pro League clubs, combined with transfer expenditure exceeding £800 million in a single window, has exposed a structural collapse at the heart of global football governance: existing financial sustainability frameworks were designed to discipline clubs, not sovereign states. This paper advances a doctrinal argument in three movements. First, it maps the jurisdictional void within the global regulatory hierarchy from FIFA through the AFC to the SPL, demonstrating that UEFA’s Club Licensing and Financial Sustainability Regulations, widely regarded as the gold standard of financial control, are structurally inapplicable to sovereign actors deliberately operating outside their jurisdictional reach. Second, it anatomizes the legal mechanisms through which the PIF exploits this void: corporate separation, sovereign immunity doctrine, and systematic jurisdictional arbitrage between continental confederations operating under irreconcilably different regulatory baselines. Third, it evaluates the doctrinal limits of available reform, engaging critically with the Meca-Medina proportionality framework, the structural weaknesses of CAS enforcement architecture, and the fundamental inadequacy of lex sportiva as a regulatory response to loss-insensitive state capital. Against this diagnosis, the paper proposes a tripartite governance blueprint: mandatory sovereignty waivers embedded within FIFA’s transfer regulatory framework, strategic deployment of the EU Foreign Subsidies Regulation as an extraterritorial enforcement backstop, and a Reverse-Assurance Guarantee mechanism requiring sovereign beneficial owners to submit to independent financial oversight as a condition of participation in the global transfer market.