How 172 Arbitration Awards Reveal the Hidden Legal Machinery of Global Sport

When a doping sanction ends an Olympic dream, a transfer dispute upends a club season, or a selection decision decides who boards the plane to the Games, the final word usually comes from a tribunal most fans have never heard of: the Court of Arbitration for Sport, known as CAS. Headquartered in Lausanne, this private court resolves eligibility, anti-doping, governance, and contractual disputes across every corner of organized sport. But a deceptively simple question sits beneath every one of its awards: how does CAS actually get the legal authority to decide a dispute in the first place? A new empirical study published in Frontiers in Sports and Active Living by Zihan Bai of Soochow University dissects that question with unusual precision, analyzing 172 public CAS decisions issued between January 2015 and April 2024 to reveal how private sporting rules are quietly converted into binding arbitral power.

The stakes are anything but academic. In classical commercial arbitration, jurisdiction flows from consent: two parties negotiate a contract, embed an arbitration clause, and agree in advance that any dispute will be settled by arbitrators rather than state courts. That model ties arbitral authority to party autonomy and keeps arbitration distinct from ordinary adjudication. Sports arbitration rarely works that way. An athlete suspended for a doping violation almost never negotiated a bespoke arbitration clause for that particular dispute. Instead, under Article R47 of the CAS Code, panels examine the applicable statutes, regulations, or specific arbitration agreements, along with licensing conditions, entry forms, and even the parties’ procedural conduct, to determine whether the legal connections between sporting rules, parties, and disputes are sufficient for jurisdiction. Bai’s study asks exactly how those connections become legally operative.

The methodological architecture of the research is as important as its findings. Bai assembled the corpus through the official CAS jurisprudence database using jurisdiction-related keyword categories, including CAS jurisdiction, arbitration agreement, lack of jurisdiction, and the doctrine of Kompetenz-Kompetenz, the principle that a tribunal may rule on its own authority. The initial search on 22 July 2026 identified 166 distinct records; a supplementary search added six more after removing duplicates, yielding 172 decisions. For each case, the extraction protocol recorded the case number, decision date, procedural label, the concrete jurisdictional passage, and its location in the award, while carefully separating the tribunal’s own finding from submissions, quotations of earlier decisions, and discussion of another body’s competence. The analysis distinguishes three elements: the procedural route to CAS, the specific instrument providing for arbitration, and the connection binding the parties to that instrument.

The descriptive results expose the jurisdictional landscape of modern sports arbitration. Of the 172 decisions, 136 were labeled Appeal Procedure, 25 Ordinary Procedure, 10 ad hoc Procedure, and one Anti-doping Procedure. Coding by actual adjudicatory role, the decisions comprise 132 appellate proceedings, 29 direct sole-instance proceedings, seven Olympic ad hoc proceedings, and four Anti-Doping Division proceedings. Within the appellate group, federation or committee statutes supplied the examined instrument in 88 of 132 records, or 66.7 percent, with disciplinary and ethics instruments in 13, dispute-resolution and transfer regulations in nine, and competition, selection, or admission instruments in nine. The direct sole-instance group is strikingly concentrated: 27 of 29 decisions discuss anti-doping rules, reflecting how regulatory referrals dominate that procedural division. These categories overlap, and the counts deliberately include provisions whose applicability was rejected or left undecided, describing the full range of instruments panels actually test in jurisdictional reasoning.

At the heart of the appellate pattern lies Article R47, the procedural threshold that directs panels to identify an appealable decision and to determine whether the applicable statutes or regulations provide for an appeal to CAS. The provision links the CAS Code to the regulatory instruments of international and national sports bodies, allowing CAS appellate jurisdiction to operate across many sports without requiring each dispute to be accompanied by a separately negotiated arbitration agreement. The case of Danilyuk Mikhail v. Football Club Shinnik illustrates the structure. The panel located jurisdiction through Article R47, Article 47(1) of the Russian Football Union Statutes, and Article 53(2) of its Dispute Resolution Regulations, the latter making the Players’ Status Committee decision appealable only to CAS. The appellant’s RFU agent licence supplied the institutional connection, while the signed Order of Procedure performed a confirming function. Each instrument did a distinct legal task, even though all supported the same conclusion.

The negative cases reveal the limits of the same route, and they are where the study’s relational account becomes most visible. In K. v. Turkish Athletics Federation and WADA, the appellant was support personnel for national-level athletes whose applicable rules provided only a domestic appeal route. He argued that defects in the independence of that forum should allow direct recourse to CAS. The panel rejected that inference, holding that CAS could not be treated as a default appeal tribunal; neither the Turkish anti-doping rules nor any specific agreement conferred jurisdiction over his appeal. Regulatory status was decisive because it determined the available appeal route, and a concern about the domestic forum did not itself create another one. Conversely, the statutory route can reach non-members where the clause is drafted broadly: in Jersey Football Association v. UEFA, the panel applied UEFA Statutes Article 62 to a directly affected non-member, rejecting the argument that only members could appeal. Membership supplies one possible connection, but the wording of the clause determines whether it is necessary.

Anti-doping decisions show how panels connect regulatory status to specific jurisdictional provisions through the layered architecture of the World Anti-Doping Code. An athlete becomes subject to anti-doping rules through federation membership, event participation, licensing, registration, or inclusion within a sport regulatory system; once that status is established, the rules allocate competence among disciplinary bodies and CAS. The panel’s task is to trace that allocation, asking whether the relevant rules apply to the athlete, whether the deciding body had authority, and whether CAS is designated as the forum for review. The case of Tatyana Chernova v. IAAF makes the distinction explicit: the appeal panel derived its own jurisdiction from Article R47 and IAAF Rule 42, then separately reviewed the first-instance arbitrator’s authority, holding that Rule 38.3’s reference to appeal procedure concerned the handling of that earlier case rather than the threshold requirements for appellate jurisdiction. Requiring an earlier decision would frustrate a rule designed to operate precisely when a national body had not supplied one.

Olympic disputes expose a temporary, event-centered jurisdictional model built for urgency. Rule 61 of the Olympic Charter and Article 1 of the CAS ad hoc rules create a route to CAS for disputes connected to the Games, subject to strict temporal limits. In the ad hoc Division case OG 18/004, the panel treated the ten-day condition as a question of jurisdiction, finding that the dispute had already arisen on 19 January, when the non-selection list was communicated, and therefore fell outside the required period, even though the applicants relied on an IOC communication of 2 February. The Olympic connection identified the relevant framework, but it did not remove that framework’s temporal condition; the result turned on when the dispute arose, not simply when the application was filed. Separately identifiable agreements and procedural conduct supply further connections: in one anti-doping case, parties signed an agreement submitting the dispute directly to CAS without a prior RUSADA hearing, with jurisdiction expressly contemplated by the Arbitration Agreement; in an Egyptian football case, a respondent that addressed the merits in its answer and raised its objection late was held to have forfeited it under Article R55 and Swiss PILA Article 186(2), while another respondent expressly withdrew its objection at the hearing.

What emerges from this comparison is a distinctive legal technology of global sport. CAS consent is governance-based rather than automatic: participation in organized sport becomes jurisdictionally relevant only through identifiable legal instruments that connect party, decision, dispute, and rule. The decisions declining jurisdiction identify which part of the connection is absent, whether the lack of a CAS appeal route for a particular regulatory position or the temporal reach of the ad hoc forum. Both disputes were connected to organized sport, but that connection alone did not satisfy the applicable jurisdictional conditions. The legal chain must be complete. Bai’s analysis shows that jurisdiction in CAS reasoning is textual, relational, and bounded: panels look for rules, those texts must connect the party and dispute to CAS, and the rule chain may fail if the relevant decision is absent, internal remedies are not exhausted, temporal limits are not met, or the party falls outside the applicable framework.

The practical implications ripple outward to every stakeholder in the sporting system. For athletes, licensing, registration, event entry, and acceptance of anti-doping rules can place them within a jurisdictional framework that later points to CAS, long before any dispute arises, making athlete-facing rules consequential legal instruments rather than technical boilerplate. For clubs, jurisdiction may be distributed across federation statutes, league rules, transfer regulations, disciplinary codes, and contractual instruments incorporating sport rules, so understanding CAS jurisdiction is part of regulatory compliance, not merely litigation strategy. For federations, the findings identify a legal design task: a rule chain that is clear, internally consistent, and connected to appealable decisions protects institutional authority by making its source legally legible. For anti-doping bodies, harmonization and clarity remain central because the enforceability of global anti-doping governance depends on transparent connections between athletes, federations, anti-doping organizations, and CAS. In a system where parties often encounter CAS through rules rather than negotiated clauses, clarity in jurisdictional drafting is a central governance value, and the public award is one site where that scrutiny occurs. By reading 172 awards systematically, the study shows how governance authority is translated into legal authority, revealing that private rules become arbitral power through jurisdictional reasoning itself.

Subject of Research: Constructing arbitral authority in CAS jurisdictional reasoning

Article Title: Constructing arbitral authority in CAS jurisdictional reasoning

Article References: Bai, Z. (2026). Constructing arbitral authority in CAS jurisdictional reasoning. Frontiers in Sports and Active Living, 8, Article 1983695. https://doi.org/10.3389/fspor.2026.1983695

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fspor.2026.1983695

Keywords: Constructing, arbitral, authority, jurisdictional, reasoning, scientific research