The Ankura Sports practice held its second Sports Governance, Compliance, and Investigations Conference in the IOC Museum, Lausanne on 25 January 2024. The conference day was proceeded by a workshop on safeguarding in sport the prior afternoon.
This invitation-only event brings together Ankura experts, clients, collaborators, and representatives from international federations across sport and sporting bodies. Also joining the expert panel and in attendance were law firms who have worked with Ankura on relevant matters.
The content of the day was a dynamic mix of panel discussions, workshops, and interview formats.
Key insights from the conference:
- The Compliance Panel chaired by Ankura Senior Managing Director
Lorynn Demetriades reviewed the state of play on compliance
programmes in sports governance. This area has become a hot topic
in sport with both increased public scrutiny and regulations, for
example, the new European Union (EU) Anti-Money Laundering (AML)
requirements. The panel concluded that, with few exceptions,
compliance in sport still has a way to go to be up to commercial
industry standards. Collectively, they agreed that a good, robust
compliance programme can help ensure sports avoid crises that then
necessitate a compliance programme.
- Ankura Managing Director Felix Vetter and Jason Shardlow-Wrest,
Managing Associate at Linklaters, updated the conference on some of
the trends in complex, regulatory investigations in sport. The
trends in this area indicate that we can expect a greater focus on
financial regulations in football/soccer as independent regulators
and legislators (such as the EU) start to enter the game. Other
sports will also likely tighten their financial regulations to
ensure competition on a level playing field.
- Jonny Gray, Ankura Senior Managing Director for Sport, chaired
a panel that focussed on integrity in sports, particularly looking
at match-fixing and competition manipulation. The panel included
Jason Van't Hof from U.S. Integrity who provided insights on
sports integrity governance in the USA post the striking down of
the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA) in 2018.
With almost 40 States now allowing global sports betting, this
increased liquidity in the sports betting market will both benefit
sports that sell their data to the betting industry, but also
further challenge them. In this dynamic, sports should continue to
benchmark, evolve, and invest in integrity programmes, ideally with
separate and independent oversight. Some revenues from data sales
need to be reinvested to manage the risk associated with in-play
sports betting. Not all sports, and indeed nations, are getting
this balance right.
- Jonny Gray and Duncan Fraser, Head of Sport and Entertainment
at Howden Insurance, ran a masterclass in sports risk management.
They urged that all sports organisations should by now have a Risk
and Audit Committee, ideally chaired by an Independent Director.
This committee should ensure coherence between insurance coverage
and risk mitigation programmes to ensure both aspects work
seamlessly to manage an ever-growing array of risk exposures.
Top-risk exposures should be routinely reviewed with at least one
tabletop exercise per annum.
- Picking up on the safeguarding in sport workshop, Ankura Senior
Director Charli Curran chaired a panel on the same topic, where the
panel stressed that the importance of not treating safeguarding
investigations in the same manner as regulatory or misconduct
investigations (i.e. fraud). Safeguarding (including racism)
investigations have been mishandled by a number of sports,
occasionally seeing the need for mass resignation of entire Boards.
Sports Governing Bodies with responsibility for athlete welfare
should have retainers in place with specialist law firms,
trauma-informed investigators, and crisis communications companies.
They highlighted that tabletop exercises would help ensure
executives better understand some of the nuances and complexities
of these matters.
- Finally, after a session demystifying the role and functioning of the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), Ankura Senior Managing Director Jonathan Brown discussed multi-club and multi-sport ownership structures with his expert panel. They concluded that these will become increasingly popular models for investors seeking synergies across their sports portfolio. But these models will challenge the regulatory regimes in many sports which will need to adapt to fit this new dynamic. To bring the challenge to life, the conference concluded with Sean Cottrell, CEO of LawInSport, running a practical exercise for attendees to face just a few of the hard choices required to ensure they get the balance right between third-party funding and integrity in sport.
Ankura Sports Practice is grateful to all delegates for attending this conference. The conference was conducted under "Chatham House Rules," hence the takeaways above are those derived by Ankura and cannot be attributed to any individual panellist or attendee.
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