ROGON, RRC Sports And The Football Ecosystem: CJEU Tackles The Scope Of The Public-interest Exception

In ROGON and Others, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) clarified the scope of the Wouters/Meca-Medina doctrine, under which sporting regulations that restrict competition may be justified by legitimate public-interest objectives. Less than a week later, in RRC Sports GmbH, the CJEU applied the same exception to FIFA's global rules on players' agents, confirming that the same reasoning used for a national federation also holds for an international federation like FIFA.

The CJEU held that the Wouters/Meca-Medina exception may, in principle, apply to rules adopted by the German Football Association (DFB) to govern the activities of players’ agents, even though those agents are not members of that association. Such rules will fall outside the scope of Article 101(1) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) if they are not restrictions of competition by object and they are justified by legitimate public-interest objectives, necessary and proportionate. This final assessment remains for the referring national court to carry out.

The CJEU reached a similar conclusion for FIFA's own rules on agents in RRC Sports, repeating the same three-part test and again leaving the final assessment – save for two rules found to be directly incompatible with the cartel prohibition – to the referring national court.

Background: the intersection between sporting regulations and EU competition law

ROGON continues the CJEU’s recent line of sports governance cases, which confirm that sports federations are not immune from the application of EU competition law.

• In Superleague, the CJEU considered UEFA’s and FIFA’s rules on prior authorisation for new interclub football competitions (see our previous article). It confirmed that, with the exception of purely non-economic rules solely related to sport, sporting regulations are not exempt from the application of EU economic law. Further, such measures cannot be defended on public-interest grounds (applying the Wouters and Meca-Medina doctrine) where their object is to restrict competition. As to prior authorisation rules in particular, these must be based on objective, transparent, non-discriminatory, and proportionate criteria – otherwise they will restrict competition by object.
   
• InFIFA v BZ (the Diarra case), the CJEU concluded that FIFA’s rules on players who terminated their contracts without “just cause” amounted to restrictions of competition (see our previous article). While the CJEU acknowledged that FIFA may legitimately seek to protect contractual stability, the contested rules went too far and operated as a form of no-poach arrangement and therefore restricted competition by object.
   
• More recently, in Tondelathe CJEU considered an agreement between Portuguese football clubs not to recruit players who had unilaterally terminated their contracts for pandemic-related reasons (see our previous article). The CJEU found that while the agreement was tantamount to a no-poach agreement, its content, objectives, and legal-economic context had to be examined before it could be treated as an object restriction.

The facts in ROGON and the questions referred to the CJEU

The case arose from the DFB’s regulation of player-agency services in German football. The DFB sits at the centre of the German football structure: its rules bind professional clubs throughout the German football league (DFL) framework and apply to players through their licence arrangements. In 2015, the DFB adopted the RfSV, a set of rules governing how clubs and players may use agents in connection with player contracts and transfers. These included agent registration obligations, a requirement to accept FIFA/DFB/DFL rules and DFB jurisdiction, limits on remuneration, a prohibition on agents taking a share in future transfer proceeds in inward transfers, and a ban on commissions for transfers of minors. 

The applicants were active in the player-agency market and challenged several of the RfSV rules before the German courts, alleging that they amounted to unlawful restrictive practices in breach of competition law. 

Following appeals from the first instance decision, the case arrived before the German Federal Court. While it was inclined to consider that the RfSV rules restricted competition, the Federal Court could not determine whether they could nevertheless fall outside Article 101(1) TFEU under the Wouters/Meca-Medina exception and therefore referred two questions to the CJEU.

1. First, can the Wouters/Meca-Medina principle apply to sports federation rules which are addressed to members but govern the use of services supplied by third-party undertakings, such as agents?
    
2. Second, if the answer to the first question is yes, must the exception be assessed separately for each provision, or can related provisions be assessed together depending on their connection with the sporting activity?

The CJEU’s ruling in ROGON

1. The CJEU held that the Wouters/Meca-Medina exception can, in principle, apply to sports federation rules affecting third-party agents.

More particularly, the CJEU held the following. 

• The RfSV rules were subject to EU competition law. They did not fall within the narrow exemption for purely non-economic sporting rules, because they regulated paid agent services connected with the placement and transfer of professional players.
   
• The RfSV rules were capable of falling within Article 101 TFEU. The DFB constituted an association of undertakings, as its members included clubs active in economic markets (ticketing, sponsorship, player recruitment, etc.) and it had not been expressly authorised by German legislation to adopt the rules as a public authority. Further, the RsFV rules constituted a decision by that association, concerning important inputs for professional football clubs that could influence team composition and sporting and commercial performance.
   
• There was nothing in the conditions for the application of the Wouters/Meca-Medina exemption that could be interpreted as precluding it from applying to rules that affect third-party undertakings, such as agents, who are not members of the association. Such rules were capable of pursuing legitimate objectives in the public interest, and of being necessary and proportionate to those objectives. They were not necessarily to be regarded as particularly harmful to competition (and therefore restrictive by object). In professional football, clubs, federations, players, and agents form part of a wider ecosystem, and the CJEU noted that legitimate objectives, such as protecting the integrity and attractiveness of sporting competitions, may require the adoption of rules and regulations that impact that ecosystem.

Nevertheless, the CJEU left it to the referring court to determine whether the contested RfSV rules satisfy the strict Wouters/Meca-Medina criteria.

2. The Wouters/Meca-Medina conditions do not always need to be assessed provision by provision.

The CJEU held that this depends on the objectives pursued and the effects produced by the relevant provisions. Where different provisions pursue different objectives or produce distinct effects, they may require separate proportionality assessments. However, where provisions are inseparable, or where some are merely ancillary to others, it may be artificial to split them up, and they should be assessed together.

In determining whether or not to assess provisions as a set, the key question is whether those provisions pursue a distinct objective or produce a distinct effect, rather than the degree of connection between them and the corporate purpose of the sporting federation that adopted them or the activity it pursues. 

RRC Sports walks a similar path to ROGON

On 16 July 2026, less than a week after ROGON, the CJEU issued its preliminary ruling in the similar case of RRC Sports GmbH. This concerned two football agents who sought, in the German courts, an injunction to prevent FIFA from implementing several rules of the FIFA Football Agent Regulations, including limits on multiple representation, caps on agent remuneration, conditions for obtaining and retaining a FIFA agent licence, and restrictions on approaching prospective clients. 

The referring German court asked the CJEU whether these rules were compatible with Article 101 and 102 TFEU (as well as the freedom to provide services and/or the EU General Data Protection Regulation). On Article 101, the referring court was unclear as to whether the Wouters/Meca-Medina exemption was available where the rules were economic in nature and did not concern the functioning of the relevant sporting competitions.

In its ruling, the CJEU started by reiterating what it had held in ROGON, namely that the Wouters/Meca-Medina exemption was potentially applicable, even though the rules did not concern the functioning of sporting competitions.

However, the CJEU did not leave the entire Article 101(1) assessment to the referring court, as in ROGON. Instead it found that two of the contested rules constituted restrictions of competition by object: (i) a rule preventing agents from claiming transfer commissions that are owed but have not yet fallen due, where a player has in the meantime terminated their contract; and (ii) a bar on agents approaching or concluding agency agreements with players that are exclusively represented by another agent, except during the two-month window before the exclusivity arrangement expires. Respectively, those rules were (i) arbitrary and (ii) distorted competition between agents, by favouring exclusive incumbents.

Additionally, the CJEU noted that some of the justifications put forward by FIFA, namely that the rules were intended to correct certain market anomalies, were of a purely economic nature and could not constitute legitimate public-interest objectives for the purposes of the Wouters/Meca-Medina exemption. Other justifications put forward by FIFA, including protecting players from unethical conduct by agents, constituted potentially legitimate objectives of wider interest. However, the CJEU left it to the referring court (albeit with some relatively detailed guidance) to determine whether they were capable of justifying the restrictions of competition, or were instead diverted from their proper function by pursuing purely economic goals.

Key takeaways

When read alongside Superleague, Diarra, and Tondela, ROGON and RRC Sports incrementally extend the practical reach of the Wouters/Meca-Medina doctrine. In particular, they extend its scope, to cover sports governance rules that regulate relations with third-party undertakings (such as agents) and are not actually concerned with the organising of the relevant competitions – provided they genuinely pursue legitimate public-interest objectives within the sporting ecosystem.

That said, RRC Sports illustrates that such rules must be finely tuned. Rules that do not genuinely pursue non-economic objectives will not be capable of justifying restrictions of competition, and arbitrary or excessively distortive rules will constitute restrictions of competition by object, which cannot benefit from the public-interest exemption.

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