Legal support for events, sport and the organisations behind them.
The firm provides specialised legal services to sports federations, clubs, companies and players, covering the drafting and review of contracts, the resolution of sports disputes, governance and compliance, and sponsorship and investment agreements.
It represents clients before the competent authorities and committees, protecting rights and supporting the sustainability of the sports sector in line with best local and international legal practice.
Qatar has no single statute that codifies sport and events as one subject. The field is instead governed by a layered set of instruments, and the starting point for organised sport is Law No. 1 of 2016 on the regulation of sports clubs, whose title concerns the regulation of sports clubs and which supplies the framework within which a club is constituted, recognised, supervised and dissolved, together with the decisions issued in implementation of it. A practitioner reading only that law will nonetheless miss most of the answers, because the obligations that actually bind a club, a federation, an organiser or a participant are drawn from the general civil, commercial, labour and intellectual property legislation of the State.
How we help
- Event and sponsorship agreements
- Sporting contracts
- Licensing and permits
- Liability and insurance considerations
- Sector disputes
In Qatar
Where a sporting or event body takes a corporate form, the Commercial Companies Law promulgated by Law No. 11 of 2015, as amended by Law No. 8 of 2021, governs its incorporation, its capital and shares, the powers and duties of its managers and board, the competence of the general assembly, the keeping of accounts and the appointment of an auditor. The consequences are practical rather than formal. The identity of the organ competent to approve a sponsorship agreement, the person whose signature binds the entity, the disclosure owed on a transaction in which a board member has an interest and the remedies available to a minority holder are all questions answered by that Law and by the constitutive documents adopted under it, not by any sporting instrument.
The contractual and liability core of the sector rests on the Civil Code promulgated by Law No. 22 of 2004, which supplies the rules on the formation and interpretation of contracts, performance in good faith, remedies for breach, liability for harmful acts, liability attaching to those who have charge of a thing or of persons under their supervision, impossibility of performance and the moderation of an obligation that has become excessively onerous. Staff engaged in Qatar are governed by the Labour Law promulgated by Law No. 14 of 2004, and by the instruments issued under it, in respect of contracts of employment, wages, leave, safety and termination.
The commercial identity of a competition, a team or an event is protected principally through Law No. 9 of 2002 on trademarks, commercial indications, trade names and geographical indications, supported by the Law on the protection of copyright and neighbouring rights promulgated by Law No. 7 of 2002 for creative and audiovisual assets, and by Law No. 13 of 2016 on personal data privacy protection where the personal information of participants, purchasers or spectators is processed. Disputes may be referred to arbitration under the Law of Arbitration in Civil and Commercial Matters promulgated by Law No. 2 of 2017, and otherwise fall to the competent Qatari courts.
One structural feature of this sector deserves emphasis at the outset. Much of what governs sport is not legislation at all. The statutes of sporting bodies, the regulations of a competition and the codes of conduct issued by an association take effect because the persons concerned have agreed to be bound by them, so their force is contractual and is measured by consent, by the authority of the person who accepted them and by their compatibility with Qatari law. Where such a rule collides with a mandatory provision of Qatari legislation or with public order, the legislative rule prevails, and a clause drafted on the assumption that a private regulation displaces the law is a clause that will not survive examination.