The Antitrust has fined the Italian Football Federation (FIGC) for over 3 million euros. The overly restrictive procedures adopted by the Federation to select Sports Directors and Sports Management Collaborators in both the amateur and professional sectors are in the sights of the competition guarantor. The procedures for the football Observers who carry out scouting activities and the Match Analysts who carry out the statistical analysis of the performance data of individual players and teams have also been sanctioned. In practice, the Antitrust has ascertained "the anti-competitive nature of the provisions of some federal regulations and the related calls for admission to training courses in relation to the professional figures mentioned above, starting at least from 2010. In particular, the FIGC established - states a note from the guarantor - a maximum number of subjects admitted to participate in the qualification courses, together with residence and/or citizenship requirements, as well as reserving the aforementioned activities to subjects registered in special federal lists, whose compulsory registration is conditional attendance and passing of the aforementioned training courses, offered exclusively by the FIGC". All this in violation of art. 101 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU)
At the end of the proceeding initiated upon notification, the Authority "detected the absence of objective justifications underlying the restrictions introduced by the FIGC regarding access to the specific professional figures in question, which were not imposed by the relevant international federations (FIFA and UEFA ), nor contemplated in other national laws. Therefore, in the absence of any regulatory coverage and, indeed, in a regulatory context of liberalization of economic activities, the Authority considered that the established restrictions constituted a serious infringement of art. 101 of the Treaty and decided to impose a fine of 3.330.659,69 euros on the Italian Football Federation.
