Multi-Club Ownership as a form of anti-competitiveness in modern sports
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.34767/DP.2025.01.06Keywords:
sports, sports club, ownership, competition, competition law, antitrust lawAbstract
The article is devoted to the phenomenon of accumulating property rights of sports clubs as enterprises in the sports industry. Such practices are currently referred to as the "multi-ownership" mechanism, or more precisely, Multi-Club Ownership. Their effect is to limit competition between such entities on individual markets. Actions undertaken within the framework of such a mechanism concern economic entities, which in broad generalization can be called sports teams. Depending on the specificity of individual sports disciplines, these may be sports clubs or other participants in sports competition, such as teams in Formula 1 races. The basic negative consequence of using the Multi-Club Ownership mechanism is to disturb the balance between the aforementioned participants in sports competition, to create an unjustified advantage of some of them over others and to distort the fundamental principles of sport, i.e. its fairness and the unpredictability of sports results.
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