Colloquium — Twenty Years On from the French Sports Code: What Relationship Between Sport and the Law?

On 17 June 2026, the CNOSF, together with the Conseil d’État, the Cour de cassation and the Centre for Sports Law and Economics (CDES), held a sports-law colloquium entitled: “Twenty years on from the French Sports Code: what relationship between sport and the law?”.

The programme: CNOSF website

Cyril Mourin’s address, and its full text, appear below.

Mr President, Madam Minister, Senator, Ladies and Gentlemen,

Let me begin, as others have, by apologising for not being a lawyer. I am a hands-on practitioner and — let me own it — a political profile. I have come to speak about how laws are made before an audience that has made this its life’s work. Custom, here, therefore calls for a few words of humility.

If I was invited to speak this morning, it was to throw light on the subject from my own experience: first in the private office of the minister for sport, from 2014 to 2017, then as the Head of State’s adviser on sport and the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games, from 2017 to 2025.

Over that period, a number of pieces of legislation touching on sport were passed — and a number of others came to nothing or, to put it less charitably, were quietly sidestepped.

Let me start by picking up where the Minister has just left off. Sport need not apologise for having a law of its own.

It serves the public interest, and it is in the public interest that the “right to sport” — for that is what it truly is — should be guaranteed within a framework that protects participants and, what is more, preserves its distinctive model, which lies at the heart of the lex sportiva and is recognised by the European treaty[1].

But while sport serves the public interest, it is not, in itself, an independent source of it.

Yet some have reasoned as though anything that fed into the world of sport were, by its very nature, in the public interest — as though there were a “sporting public interest” that justified itself.

That is not so. And it has two consequences:

• First, that article of law by article of law — just as euro by euro — sport, like every sector, must show how each reform feeds and serves that public interest.
• Second, that if sport serves the public interest, then drafting sports law cannot, by its very nature, be confined to sports law alone. Sport is also about health, the economy, security, education and social cohesion — which inevitably draws in several ministries, several codes and several legal cultures.

These two dynamics are worth keeping in mind, because they both feed into the complex, uncertain and unstable game that is the making of the law. I shall try to describe some of its mechanics briefly, then draw out a few thoughts on what I believe to be the law’s weaknesses, before closing with some proposals.

On how the law is drafted, my first point simply confirms what everyone more than suspects: the growing weight, over the years and well beyond the letter of the Constitution, of the executive — and of Matignon, the Prime Minister’s office, in particular — in shaping the law.

In the overwhelming majority of cases, sports law is not drafted at the Palais Bourbon, seat of the National Assembly, or at the Palais du Luxembourg, seat of the Senate. It is drafted at Matignon, in interministerial meetings — the famous RIMs (réunions interministérielles). That, I will say plainly, is where most of the points that matter get written; where positions on government and parliamentary amendments are settled, along with the strategies for anticipating sticking points or even working around them; and where texts are dropped when it looks unlikely that any majority will back them.

But before we reach Matignon, a word, of course, about the Ministry of Sports. I will not repeat here the whole of Charles Dudognon’s address on legislative initiative, with its apt distinction between texts that are imposed and texts that are chosen. In any event, the ministry retains a large share of legislative initiative — or of drafting in response to other ministries — through its own administration. The role of the sports directorate is therefore decisive in the very wording of the law.

The first illustration of this shift of lawmaking towards the executive — at any rate beyond the spirit and the letter of the Constitution — is, in fact, the Ministry of Sports’ use of the parliamentary time set aside for members’ business.

Thierry Braillard and Roxana Maracineanu, to take just two examples, launched initiatives that by their very nature called for legislation. They chose to use bills introduced by members of Parliament, having first worked up an initial draft with their departments after a long process of consultation.

The “Le Roux bill” is in fact the Braillard Act of 27 November 2015[2] on the status of elite athletes. Choosing a member’s bill was a pragmatic move: not a way to avoid referral to the Conseil d’État — which was, in fact, brought in anyway — but a way of securing the legislative timetable on the one hand and, on the other, of heading off interministerial deadlock before the text was even tabled. An MP needs no green light from the government to table a text — no small advantage when it comes to moving a debate forward and getting a matter onto the agenda. It is a phenomenon that has grown considerably in recent years.

The content is then settled higher up, at Matignon and the Élysée. One point first — at least in sport, though this may have owed as much to the profiles of the advisers at Matignon: one cannot help noting how imprecise Édouard Philippe’s famous line really was, the one that earned him the 2019 prize for political humour. Asked whether everything ended up at Matignon, he replied: “No, only the headaches.” By which he meant, above all, the disagreements between ministries. Well, the practice of power has in fact drifted somewhat, for I must concede that I sat in on a few RIMs about texts to which only the Ministry of Sports had been invited, to present this or that measure — legislative ones included — and have it arbitrated. That says something about how far the ministry’s autonomy in the making of the law has evolved. I am thinking in particular of certain articles of the Act of 2 March 2022[3] that had been the subject of intense exchanges between Matignon and the ministry — for instance, the limits on holding multiple offices[4] for federation presidents.

We also lived through episodes of crisis — political, social or health-related — that led to fast-track or accelerated procedures, votes under Article 49.3, legislation by ordinance, and the coordination required for the Olympic acts (under the successive interministerial delegations for the Games, attached to the rue de Varenne). All of this heightened this phenomenon of lawmaking under Matignon’s aegis.

The RIM is chaired by the Prime Minister’s office — most often by the sector adviser or advisers concerned, sometimes by the chief of staff and, on the most important matters, by the Prime Minister in person. The Secretariat-General of the Government runs the meeting on the technical side, holds the pen, so to speak, in drafting the texts, and acts in particular as the interface with the Conseil d’État. It plays an essential role. In running the meeting, its real weight depends on the standing of Matignon’s representative in the room. A technical adviser only recently arrived, who knows neither the codes nor the people yet, does not have quite the same grip as an adviser seasoned in the exercise and close to the chief of staff. I leave you to picture the symbolic space a young adviser would occupy in the arbitration process if seated alongside Marc Guillaume. All the ministries concerned take part and, under Emmanuel Macron, up until the dissolution, so did the Élysée’s representative. Here too the practice strays somewhat from the letter of the Constitution, yet is in keeping with how our institutions have evolved — I will not dwell on it here.

The conclusions of these meetings — the famous “blues”, the binding written records — are very largely prepared ahead of the RIM, on the basis of the documents submitted by the ministries. It is fairly rare for the decision arbitrated at the close of a RIM to differ substantially from the one “pre-cooked” beforehand by Matignon and the Élysée.

In this behind-the-scenes phase, then, the influence of the Prime Minister’s or the President’s offices counts.

During the period I knew, the defining feature was the absence of any opposition between the Élysée, Matignon and the Ministry of Sports on the overwhelming majority of subjects. Quite the contrary: a fairly tight-knit team formed to defend the sector’s interests against colleagues from other ministries, and to keep our field alive.

Our approach was utilitarian and pragmatic. At a time when what counts is whether reforms actually take hold — whether people see and feel them — it was easier, on the one hand, to act in small touches and, on the other, to seize the openings offered by other sectors to slip in long-awaited reforms. Simplifying the medical certificate within the so-called ASAP simplification act[5] is one example. In doing so — I admit — we made it all the less obvious to draft a single, sweeping framework law. The earlier ones, old though they may be, have lost none of their force.

For want of time, I will not dwell here on the place of the various lobbies that take part in this drafting process. For want of time, but also because there is nothing peculiarly sporting about it — though the way stakeholders organise themselves, and the difficulty some of them have in putting forward concrete, precise demands, has not always helped them to be heard.

None of this, finally, means that Parliament plays any smaller part in the making of the law. Its role is pre-eminent. Our parliamentarians, some of them specialists in sport, are very much present at every stage I have just described, backed by officials of excellent legal calibre. They put questions to ministers and to the Head of State, engage with the administrations, and raise new issues. That role is all the more pre-eminent, of course, as parliamentary majorities grow narrower — as we have been seeing since the dissolution of the National Assembly called in 2024.

From these governmental and parliamentary mechanics, which have enabled us to reform our law, I nonetheless want to list a few perverse effects that we must face squarely, because they are turning into weaknesses.

I will mention five of them, briefly.

The first stems — in part, for it is not the only reason — from a tension I have not yet mentioned: the relationship between the administrations and the ministerial offices. In RIMs, I have seen sequences where administrations — in the absence of the ministerial offices — defended a position that was not quite their minister’s.

Now, a RIM is not a colloquium: it is where a political direction is carried out. More than one measure thought to be settled at the political level has, in reality, dissolved at the administrative one.

And so winning the arbitration on a piece of legislation can be deceptive. I will give just one example, which says something about how the law gets made.

The collective image rights of professional athletes[6], written into the Act of 1 March 2017. A good measure. Worked on at length beforehand with stakeholders and parliamentarians. Then, in an interministerial meeting to set the government’s position, I fought the Ministry of Social Affairs, which opposed it — and we won, but at the price of an amended wording. The provision was passed. A few months later, however, the same drama played out again, this time at the implementation stage: the administration saw to it, methodically, that the measure would not be workable. Decrees pushed back — it took seventeen months after the law’s promulgation for the implementing decree[7] of its Article 17 to appear, on a matter the professional clubs had long awaited — narrower drafting, tougher inspection guidance. The law was passed by the nation’s representatives. In practice, it was never applied outside rugby.

This is what I call, to give it a name, an orphan law: passed, but with no parent to apply or enforce it. And I could cite any number of examples, whether chosen or imposed.

The second is the “decree-law”: an oxymoron meant to capture the failure, in sporting matters, to respect Article 34 of the Constitution. The wish to give sport a legislative substance, together with the ease afforded by codification, led to a deliberate disregard for the proper domain of statute. This legislative creep also has very concrete side-effects, such as the Conseil d’État’s reversal of its case law in its decision of 15 March 2023[8], holding that the administrative courts now have jurisdiction over certain — and in fact numerous — statutory provisions of the delegated federations. It is a sign of legislative inflation in statutory rules.

The third weakness is the “mantra law”. The famous law on the Olympic legacy — Franck Latty will no doubt return to it — is its most telling illustration: over several years it was announced, awaited, redefined, deferred and brandished as proof that the State would never do enough — even though neither the Government, nor Parliament, nor the sports movement could say precisely what it should contain, beyond the budgetary matters that belong in a finance act. The exact opposite of what a law is supposed to be: an instrument serving a clearly defined objective.

The fourth is the “palimpsest law”, in which one can still read, showing through, the texts one thought had been erased, or that there was no time — or no wish — to streamline. The best example in recent years is the republican commitment contract, which was layered onto the delegation contract for federations, on top of which come — beyond accreditation itself — the federal performance plan, and so on. I have, for that matter, counted five ethics or republican-principles charters: two from the CNOSF (L141-3 and L141-3-1), one from the CPSF (L141-8), one from the National Sports Agency (L112-16) and one from the delegated federations (L131-15-1), all of them supplementing these contracts and all of statutory value. I will not dwell on it.

I will not take up here what one might call the “rolling-news law” — that is, the law brandished in response to a news item. Sport has been fairly well spared it; just imagine what Jean-Christophe Breillat’s opening remarks on legislative inflation would have been had he been talking about the Internal Security Code…

And the final weakness, which somewhat gathers up the previous ones, is what I would call the “professorial law”. It is the law by which you stand in for private parties — some of them, admittedly, delegated public-service operators — on the grounds that you doubt their ability to make good decisions, and so decide in their place, even outside the scope of the delegation. That is why, for example, the bill currently under debate on professional sport[9], useful though it is for democratising and modernising the governance of professional sport, should not leave it to the legislature to decide, say, how many Ligue 1 matches are to be broadcast free-to-air. That is a question of economic strategy, and it should belong to those who fund the model…

Because of these weaknesses, our law has grown too talkative — at times undermining its own force — and is, moreover, wielded as the indispensable lever of any major reform. I do not believe that it is.

The first of the recommendations I draw from my experience is that a great deal can be shaped, changed and transformed without resorting to legislation, because the existing framework is enough — and I hope that all stakeholders, including during the flurry of ideas and proposals we are about to see in the run-up to the presidential election, will bear this in mind.

The Pass’Sport scheme, the “5,000 sports grounds” plan, the “1,000 neighbourhood coaches” plan, the sport-and-health centres, the mentoring plan, Ambition Bleue, the national grand cause, the 30 minutes of daily physical activity in primary school, the fitness tests in Year 7, the national sports day — I will not list them all: but nothing, in all these public policies that have marked the action of the Head of State and of successive sports ministers, requires a law. And it is not to bypass Parliament, I want to be clear — it is quite simply that the law is not always the most suitable tool, or that the matter does not fall to it. And the next ministers will be able to strengthen them, correct them or scrap them. In short: to act.

We need, I believe, to rediscover in sporting matters — and in public action more broadly — a taste for the contract, for reciprocal commitments. This is plainly not at odds with legitimate and necessary legal regulation: it is its complement. One sometimes has the feeling that the public sphere almost resents the idea that things might be done, that one might succeed, without it.

Briefly, three further levers — with no change to the law as it stands — seem to me within reach of a political compact between the institutions concerned.

First, a serious act of de-legalisation[10] — leaving the substance of the law untouched — through an ordinance simplifying the French Sports Code, would restore both the code’s clarity and the minister’s room to act. This would be, I am convinced, one of the most useful reforms to undertake in the years ahead — and one in which the Conseil d’État could be fully involved, for that matter. It could affect close to 25% of the French Sports Code.

Second, more regular use of Article 39, paragraph 5, of the Constitution which, since the 2008 revision, allows the president of an assembly to refer a member’s bill to the Conseil d’État for its opinion — a practice that has remained exceptional and that should be made the rule for texts amending the French Sports Code beyond a certain threshold.

Third, the systematic use of the three-year evaluation of the effects and application of laws, already provided for by the Rules of Procedure of the National Assembly since the 2014 reform. The Bruneau-Clavet-Riotton report[11] on the Act of 2 March 2022 is the most recent instance of it. In sporting matters, though, such an evaluation would gain from being systematically enriched through a formal joint effort with the CNOSF, on behalf of the federations, and the National Sports Agency — which are the first to be concerned and the first to observe a law’s real effects. 

Twenty years on from the code, my conclusion can be put in few words. Codification was right to rationalise our law and make it easier to read. Its perverse effect has been to turn amending that code into a reflex.

From now on, sports law must once again become a means, not an end — rarer, better written, better scrutinised ex ante, better evaluated ex post. And, above all, applicable.

Because the worst law, to my mind, is not the badly written one: it is the law that goes unapplied. It erodes the credibility of public commitments and trust in our law — and therefore in our institutions.

And that, no doubt, is what leads some — wrongly — to hope to see the State pushed out of sports policy, when in fact we urgently need a strong State to protect and support French sport, its volunteers, our clubs and everyone who takes part in it.

Thank you.

[1] Article 165, TFEU

[2] Act No. 2015-1541 of 27 November 2015 to protect elite and professional athletes and to secure their legal and social situation

[3] Act No. 2022-296 of 2 March 2022 to democratise sport in France

[4] Article 38, II, ter.

[5] Article 5 of Act No. 2020-1525 of 7 December 2020 on accelerating and simplifying public action

[6] Article 17 of Act No. 2017-261 of 1 March 2017 to preserve the ethics of sport, strengthen the regulation and transparency of professional sport, and improve the competitiveness of clubs

[7] Decree No. 2018-691 of 1 August 2018 on the commercial exploitation of the image, name and voice of professional athletes and coaches

[8] Conseil d’État, 15 March 2023, No. 466632 — French Billiards Federation

[9] Bill on the organisation, management and financing of professional sport, No. 456, tabled in the Senate on Tuesday 18 March 2025

[10] Article 37, paragraph 2, of the Constitution

[11] Information report tabled pursuant to Article 145-7, paragraph 1, of the Rules of Procedure, by the Committee on Cultural Affairs and Education, on the evaluation of Act No. 2022-296 of 2 March 2022 to democratise sport in France (Joël Bruneau MP, Bruno Clavet MP and Véronique Riotton MP), No. 2465