The European Court of Justice’s ruling in the Agnelli and Arrivabene case — establishing that those sanctioned by Italian sports justice bodies must have the right to challenge those sanctions before an independent ordinary court — has triggered an immediate institutional response at the highest levels of Italian sport governance. CONI president Luciano Buonfiglio has confirmed that the organisation is already mobilising to address the implications of a judgment that goes to the heart of how Italian sport justice is structured and administered.
Buonfiglio’s Statement: “We Are Activating a Swift Action Plan”
The CONI president wasted little time in acknowledging the significance of the ruling. “We have taken note of the content of the judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union on sport justice,” Buonfiglio said in an official statement, “and we are activating ourselves to agree a swift action plan with the relevant institutional bodies and actors.”
The language is measured but its implications are far-reaching. For the first time, a binding ruling from Europe’s highest court has established that the current architecture of Italian sports justice — in which sanctions can be imposed and upheld through internal sporting bodies without access to genuine independent judicial review — does not meet the standards required under EU law.
The Reform That Has Been Waiting for This Moment
Buonfiglio was also transparent about the degree to which the CONI had been holding back its own reform proposals pending precisely this kind of external clarity. “As we have emphasised on several occasions, we had subordinated the definition of the regulatory interventions relating to a broader reform of this area to the outcome of the EU ruling — and now we are ready to evaluate the most appropriate paths to harmonise its effects with the proposals currently being elaborated.”
In other words, the EU judgment does not catch CONI entirely unprepared. Reform proposals have been in development, awaiting the legal clarity that Luxembourg has now provided. The process of aligning Italian sports justice with European standards — ensuring that genuine independent judicial review is available to those who face professional bans from sporting activity — can now begin in earnest.
What This Means in Practice
For Italian football specifically, the judgment poses significant questions. The FIGC’s internal justice system — through which the capital gains cases involving Juventus, their executives, and other clubs were prosecuted — will need to be assessed against the European Court’s requirements for independence, judicial power, and the right to challenge sanctions before a court genuinely independent of the sporting bodies that imposed them.
Whether existing sanctions — including those handed down in the Agnelli and Arrivabene cases — may be revisited, challenged, or ultimately set aside as a result of this ruling is a question that will now be referred back to the Italian administrative courts, as the European judgment directed. The reform of Italian sports justice, long discussed and repeatedly deferred, is no longer a matter of choice or convenience. It is, as of today, a legal and constitutional necessity.
