As Milan hosts the 2026 Winter Olympic Games, attention is turning to venues, athletes, and the choreography of a global sporting spectacle. Yet many of the most consequential decisions surrounding the Games will never be televised. According to the research of Pedro José Mercado Jaén, many of these decisions take place far from the ice rinks and finish lines, inside disciplinary chambers, ethics committees, and arbitration panels that decide who may compete, who is sanctioned, and how disputes are resolved.
These are the courts most spectators never see.
Pedro José Mercado Jaén, a doctoral researcher in the EUI Department of Law, focuses his research precisely on these arenas of justice. Based on his analysis, he argues that this system constitutes a parallel legal order that resembles a judiciary in form and function, but operates largely outside the public legal systems we are used to. “In states, we separate legislative, executive, and judicial powers,” Pedro explains. “When private organisations perform functions that look very much like those of courts and public authorities, it is only fair to ask whether they should meet similar standards of independence, transparency, and accountability that we expect from state institutions.”
Sport has always been central to Pedro’s life. He grew up watching it, practising it, and following competitions closely. Law was the other long-standing ambition. But, partway through his law degree, the enthusiasm began to fade.
“You start with a lot of energy,” he recalls. “But as you move forward, that excitement slowly disappears.”
The turning point came during an Erasmus exchange at KU Leuven (Belgium), when he enrolled in a course on international arbitration. “It was the first time something in law immediately connected to sport,” he says. “That’s when I realised I could combine the two things I cared about,” he explains.
After completing an Erasmus Mundus master’s programme in Sport Ethics and Integrity, where he studied sports from legal, sociological, and ethical perspectives, Pedro arrived at the EUI to pursue a PhD. What attracted him, he explains, was the possibility to develop an independent project that crossed disciplinary boundaries. “Here, I could come with an idea I was genuinely interested in and have the freedom to develop it,” he says.
Pedro’s work starts from the way global sport is organised as a pyramid, with bodies such as the International Olympic Committee at the top, international federations beneath them, and national federations forming the base. He notes that within this structure, disputes between athletes, federations, clubs, or officials are channelled through judicial bodies created and controlled by the federations themselves.
“Athletes are forced to follow these mechanisms,” Pedro explains. Participation in organised sport typically requires a licence or contractual relationship that, in most cases, commits them to the federation’s dispute-resolution system. “They cannot simply go to a domestic court.”
He illustrates this dynamic with a common situation in professional football. If a club stops paying a player’s salary, the instinct might be to go to a labour or civil court. In international football, however, the dispute is channelled into FIFA’s adjudicatory system. The player must bring the claim before the relevant chamber of FIFA’s Football Tribunal, which decides whether the contract was breached, can order payment and impose sporting sanctions. Any appeal goes not to a domestic court, but to the Court of Arbitration for Sport. What looks like an ordinary employment dispute is therefore resolved within a transnational sports-specific judicial framework rather than the state judiciary.
Pedro’s research also shows that appeals follow a distinct path. In most international sports, the final instance is not a national supreme court but the Court of Arbitration for Sport, based in Switzerland. “It works as the Supreme Court of sport,” Pedro says, describing panels of arbitrators who resolve disputes that can affect careers, reputations, and livelihoods.
The existence of this parallel system has traditionally been justified, as Pedro explains, by what is often called the “specificity of sport”. Competitions require fast decisions and technical expertise. “In sport, timing is crucial,” he notes. “You cannot wait years for a judgment when a competition is happening tomorrow.”
At the same time, his research shows that the system has become increasingly formalised. Especially in the past decade, international federations have strengthened procedural safeguards and emphasised the independence of their judicial bodies. Yet Pedro’s analysis suggests that formal rules alone do not capture how these systems function in practice.
To understand how sports justice is actually organised, Pedro undertook a large comparative study, building a dataset covering 39 international sports federations. He systematically coded how each federation establishes disciplinary, ethics, and appeals bodies, and how these bodies relate to the federation’s executive and legislative organs.
“I wanted to see the bigger picture,” he explains. “Not just individual cases, but the overall architecture.”
Based on this dataset, Pedro identifies three broad models. Some federations have no standing internal judicial body at all and send disputes directly to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS). Others maintain a single internal tribunal whose decisions can be appealed to the CAS. The most complex systems resemble national court hierarchies, with multiple internal instances before a final external appeal.
“These models simplify reality,” Pedro acknowledges. “But they help us understand how different federations approach justice.”
One of the key findings of his research is what does not explain this variation. Wealth, size, and institutional age do not reliably predict how robust a federation’s judicial system is. “It’s not simply about resources,” he says. “It’s about how power is organised internally.”
This is where questions of independence become central in Pedro’s work. Drawing on legal theory and comparative analysis, he examines how judicial independence is understood and implemented in private organisations. In sports federations, judicial bodies are often appointed by executive committees or general assemblies dominated by federation leadership. “Who appoints the judges, for how long, and under what conditions really matters,” Pedro says.
Even where formal safeguards exist, Pedro’s research points to the role of informal power dynamics. “The same organisation is often making the rules and judging their application,” he notes. “That creates an inherent tension.”
His research also highlights questions of qualifications. While many federations require legal training for chairs of panels, other panel members may be appointed without formal legal expertise. Some are former athletes or administrators, valued for their insider knowledge of the sport. As Pedro explains, this experience can be valuable, but it also raises concerns when individuals are tasked with deciding legal disputes.
He also notes that this becomes problematic in cases involving sexual harassment or abuse. His research shows that members of internal judicial bodies are often not required to have training in trauma-informed approaches or experience working with victims, raising questions about how well these systems can handle sensitive cases responsibly.
These issues become particularly acute in cases involving human rights. Over the past decade, organisations such as FIFA have adopted human rights policies and due-diligence frameworks, especially in response to criticism surrounding major tournaments. Pedro has analysed this shift in a co-authored article in The International Sports Law Journal, focusing not only on the content of these policies but also on how they are used in practice.
“There have been real changes inside organisations after adopting these policies,” he says. “But there is often a disconnect between internal administrative work and how leadership behaves externally.”
The hosting of the 2022 World Cup in Qatar featured prominently in Pedro’s prior work before joining the EUI. Reports of labour exploitation and working conditions placed FIFA under intense scrutiny. Human rights clauses were incorporated into host-city contracts, and FIFA pointed to its internal mechanisms as evidence of accountability. Pedro’s research, however, draws attention to a structural limitation that often goes unnoticed.
“Only the parties to these contracts can bring claims,” he explains. “Migrant workers affected by violations are not parties to the host-city contract, so they cannot directly trigger these mechanisms.”
According to Pedro, this creates a situation in which human rights language is present, but access to justice remains restricted. “You can say that human rights are integrated,” he says, “but in practice, very few actors are able to activate these procedures.”
A similar issue arises, he notes, when civil society organisations attempt to raise concerns through internal ethics bodies. While complaints can sometimes be submitted, Pedro’s research shows that decision-making power remains concentrated within the federation. “The question is not only whether a mechanism exists,” he argues, “but who controls it.”
The Olympic Games provide a concentrated example of how this system operates. As Pedro explains, during the Games the Court of Arbitration for Sport establishes an ad hoc division in the host country to resolve disputes within hours or days. Equipment approvals, eligibility challenges, and participation disputes are handled at extraordinary speed to ensure competitions proceed without delay.
“It’s justice under extreme time pressure,” Pedro says. From his perspective, this illustrates both the efficiency of the system and its distance from ordinary courts.
For Pedro, sport is therefore not an exception but an analytically revealing case. His research connects developments in sports governance to broader transformations in law, including the growing privatisation of dispute resolution and the exercise of public-like power by non-state actors.
“We are seeing more and more disputes resolved outside courts,” he says. “Sport just makes this especially visible.”
In Pedro’s view, the tools of law are still present in these settings: investigations, evidence, hearings, sanctions. What changes is the institutional context in which they operate. “If private organisations perform functions that resemble those of states,” Pedro argues, “we need to look carefully at how they govern.”
That, he suggests, requires moving beyond formal rules to examine practices, power relations, and the experiences of those subject to these systems, particularly athletes, who often lack the resources to challenge decisions. “For most fans, this remains invisible,” Pedro says. “Unless there is a scandal, the system stays hidden.”
As the Olympic flame burns in Milan, the world will focus on moments of triumph and defeat. According to Pedro’s research, parallel courts will work at speed in the background, shaping outcomes that matter deeply to those involved.
Pedro points to the recent exclusion of a Ukrainian athlete during the Milano-Cortina Games after competing with a helmet bearing a tribute to fallen compatriots during the war. The decision was challenged before the CAS ad hoc Division for the Milano-Cortina Games, which dismissed the appeal. “While spectators see the competition unfold on the field of play, questions such as freedom of expression can be decided in real time through a fast-track judicial process operating alongside the Games,” he notes. For Pedro, the episode is less about the individual outcome than about the institutional framework in which such decisions are made.
Pedro’s work invites us to look beyond the spectacle to the institutions that quietly judge global sport. In doing so, it raises a question that reaches far beyond sport arenas: When justice is exercised outside the courts we know, who is watching the courts we never see?
Pedro José Mercado Jaén is a doctoral researcher in the EUI Department of Law. His thesis “Adjudicating the Lex Sportiva in International Sport Federations” is supervised by Mathias Siems, and co-supervised by Antoine Duval, an alumnus of the EUI. He has co-authored several peer-reviewed articles on these issues, published in The International Sports Law Journal, the Cambridge Yearbook of European Legal Studies, and Frontiers in Sports and Active Living.
Picture via shutterstock.com / Collection Maykova