Within the first few months of practice at the Bar, some 20 years ago, I had to cover for a colleague in an unwinnable dispute between a football club (my client) and a player. The club had just stopped paying the player’s wages. With all the parties in the same building, I managed to negotiate a deal allowing the club to release the player and pay him off over years. It was a good result and I started getting more instructions from the solicitor. I think coming to the Bar later in life life meant I had a more commercial and practical outlook and that fitted with most sport clients’ needs. I have always been a big football fan so the chance to pick up more football cases was one I relished. But the other thing that increasingly attracted me to sport law was the fact it engaged so many diverse areas of law, from commercial and employment, to regulatory and IP. I find both the factual nexus, and the various different legal challenges endlessly stimulating.
The increase in commercialisation of sport has led to a huge increase in legal disputes over the past 20 years. That tendency is increasing, and sports’ governing bodies have had to drag their internal processes into a more modern world, with greater emphasis on fairness and transparency. That process will continue, but so too will the threats to established sports’ governing bodies from breakaway leagues and new technological ways of broadcasting and exploiting sport.
It’s impossible to highlight only one, recent years have highlighted a number of very important new developments: safeguarding issues (both in terms of sexual abuse, but also systematic training/physical abuse of young players by sports coaches and teams), racism, the struggle of women’s sport to be on a more equal footing to men’s, gender identity issues, the increasing tendency toward strict financial regulation of sport and the difficulties with applying inflexible rules following the Covid-19 pandemic, greater regulation of the ownership of sports teams, the emergence of breakaway leagues, and the impact of the recent war in Europe on international sport (including the banning of Russian teams, players, and club owners). Sport is a microcosm of society, with so many of the most difficult social and political issues being played out first, or most prominently, within the realm of sport.
I used to be a film and video editor before coming to the Bar, and so it would probably be filmmaking. Being a barrister has a lot more in common with being a film editor than people often imagine: I used to have to go through hours and hours of footage to try and create an engaging short programme on whatever subject paid the bill. Now it’s files of evidence or law books to construct a short and persuasive argument. I do miss the visual creativity though, because I think I am more of a visual than literal person, but I try to pursue that through some of my hobbies. The other thing I have always dreamt of since being a child is having my own Italian restaurant. I love cooking, and I love food. But I know that running a restaurant is much harder than being a lawyer!
