The Court of Arbitration for Sport celebrated its fortieth anniversary in 2024 with a caseload that would have been unimaginable at its founding: over 1,200 cases filed in 2023 alone, covering everything from Olympic athlete eligibility disputes to multi-hundred-million-dollar transfer fee disagreements. CAS has become the supreme court of global sport — a role it assumed without democratic mandate and maintains through a combination of contractual obligation and institutional inertia that has attracted sustained and sophisticated criticism.
The Structural Critique of CAS
The most fundamental criticism of CAS is institutional: it is not truly independent. The list of arbitrators from which CAS panels are drawn is controlled by the International Council of Arbitration for Sport, whose composition and funding are dominated by sports governing bodies — the same organisations that are frequently parties to CAS proceedings. Critics argue that this creates an inevitable structural bias toward governing body positions, even without any individual arbitrator acting improperly.
The European Court of Human Rights addressed this directly in its landmark 2018 Mutu and Pechstein judgment, which found that certain aspects of CAS proceedings raised concerns under Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights — the right to a fair trial. The Court stopped short of finding CAS incompatible with Article 6, but it identified the lack of genuine voluntariness in CAS agreements — athletes must accept CAS jurisdiction as a condition of competing, they have no real choice — as a significant concern.
In the years since, CAS has implemented procedural reforms designed to address some of these criticisms: expanded arbitrator lists, stronger conflict-of-interest requirements, improved transparency in panel selection. The reforms have satisfied some critics and left others unconvinced. The fundamental power asymmetry — governing bodies with large legal departments and institutional knowledge of CAS practice versus individual athletes often represented by solo practitioners — has not been resolved by procedural change.
Recent CAS Decisions That Have Favoured Athletes
Against the structural critique, it is important to note that CAS has produced a series of significant decisions in athletes' favour in 2025 and 2026 that suggest the system is capable of rendering balanced justice. Several national federation decisions imposing match-fixing bans have been overturned by CAS on evidentiary grounds, finding that the federations had not met the civil standard of proof. Doping sanction reductions have been granted in cases where contamination defences were well-documented. Eligibility decisions in gender categories have been scrutinised with greater rigour — though these cases remain among the most contested in CAS history.
The trend in CAS jurisprudence toward requiring national federations to provide better reasoned decisions — not just announcing outcomes but explaining the evidence and legal standards applied — has been significant. It has forced governing bodies to be more disciplined in their processes, knowing that the reasoning will face independent scrutiny.
The Ad Hoc Panels: Sport's Emergency Court
One of CAS's most valuable but least understood functions is the operation of ad hoc panels at major international competitions — the Olympics, Commonwealth Games, and selected other events. These panels hear and decide athlete eligibility cases within 24 hours of filing, providing an emergency legal remedy that no national court system can match in speed. The compressed timeline raises its own fairness concerns, but for athletes facing eligibility exclusion on the eve of competition, the ad hoc system provides at least the possibility of immediate relief.
What Athletes Should Know Before Their CAS Case
If you are an athlete facing a CAS proceeding, understanding the process before you engage with it is essential. CAS proceedings are formal legal arbitrations, not sport-specific mediation sessions — the evidentiary standards, procedural rules, and legal arguments matter enormously and require specialist legal representation. The timelines are strict and unforgiving. The cost of CAS proceedings can be significant, though cost awards against losing parties are available in some categories of case. And the standard of review applied by CAS panels — de novo review, which means the panel assesses the evidence independently rather than simply reviewing whether the federation's decision was reasonable — gives athletes a genuine opportunity to overturn decisions that were procedurally or substantively flawed at the federation level.
CAS is an imperfect system operating in a complex environment. It is also, in 2026, the only system that provides binding international dispute resolution for professional athletes at the speed that sport requires. Working within it effectively, rather than criticising it from outside, remains the most realistic path to just outcomes for athletes who find themselves in dispute with governing bodies or clubs.
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