CJEU on Agent Rules: Case C-209/23 and EU AML 2029

On 16 July 2026 the Court of Justice of the European Union handed down its judgment in Case C-209/23 (RRC Sports). The headline is narrower than the immediate commentary suggests. The Court left the referring court to apply its guidance to most of the contested rules. Two points were expressed more strongly than the rest: the approach rule appears, in any event, to be incompatible with the prohibition on cartels, while the GDPR conclusion on disclosure and publication is unqualified. The latter may have consequences for how agents are diligenced under EU Regulation 2024/1624 from 10 July 2029.

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What the Court was asked

The reference came from the Regional Court, Mainz. Two agents -- RRC Sports, a company established in Germany, and its managing director -- sought an injunction to prevent implementation of several FIFA rules governing the activities of football agents and coaches. The contested provisions sit across the FIFA Regulations on the Status and Transfer of Players and the FIFA Football Agent Regulations, the latter in force since 2023.

Five categories were in issue:

the prohibition on simultaneously representing two or three of the parties to a transfer of a player or coach -- the player or coach, the engaging entity and the releasing entity -- subject to an exception for joint representation of the player or coach and the engaging entity where both give express consent
the remuneration rules, including the cap expressed as a percentage of the transfer fee or of annual remuneration, the prohibition in principle on third parties paying remuneration due under a representation agreement on behalf of the agent’s contracting partners, and the presumption that other services provided by an agent in the 24 months before or after agent services form part of those agent services
the licence conditions -- submission to FIFA’s rules and, by default, Swiss law; submission to the jurisdiction of FIFA, its member federations and CAS; and the requirement never to have been found guilty in criminal proceedings of certain offences, or suspended for two years or more, disqualified or struck off by a regulatory authority or sports governing body for failure to comply with ethics and professional conduct rules
the approach rules governing the possibility of seeking new players or coaches to represent
the information obligations -- upload to a digital platform managed by FIFA, and onward availability of agent identities, client lists, services provided, sanctions imposed and full transaction detail including remuneration amounts to clubs, single-entity leagues, players, coaches and other agents

The agents pleaded the prohibitions on cartels and on abuse of a dominant position, the freedom to provide services, and the GDPR.

The framing point most reporting has flattened: the Court held that it is ultimately for the referring court to assess whether the contested FIFA rules are contrary to the prohibition on cartels, or whether they may be considered justified. For the general cartel assessment, the CJEU supplied criteria rather than deciding the underlying dispute. It nevertheless reached specific conclusions on other issues, including the GDPR point addressed below.

The approach rule: the Court’s strongest competition-law indication

One finding is expressed in materially stronger terms than the rest. The rule prohibiting agents from approaching or concluding representation agreements with a client already bound by an exclusive representation agreement, outside the two-month window preceding expiry of that agreement, appears in any event to be incompatible with the prohibition on cartels.

The reasoning is structural rather than economic. The restriction does not apply to the agent who already holds the exclusive agreement. That agent can renegotiate the terms or conclude a new contract outside the window. The rule therefore grants the incumbent an undue advantage -- and it is that asymmetry, rather than the existence of a window as such, that the Court identified as the defect.

Note the register even here: "appears, in any event, to be". That is the Court’s strongest competition-law statement on any contested rule, but it remains framed as guidance for the referring court.

Dominance and free movement: what goes back to Mainz

On abuse of a dominant position, the Court found that FIFA may be regarded as occupying a dominant position on the market for agent services as regards the international transfer of professional players and coaches, and on the employment market for players and coaches. That position results from the regulatory, supervisory and sanctioning power FIFA exercises in respect of those markets. Whether the contested rules constitute an abuse of those positions, and whether any such conduct can be justified, is for the referring court.

On the freedom to provide services, the Court identified three obstacles: the rules limiting multiple representation; the agent licence rules in so far as they make the granting of a licence conditional on the agent not having been subject to certain criminal or disciplinary measures; and the rules on making approaches.

The forum and governing law conditions were treated differently. Requiring agents to submit to FIFA’s rules and, by default, to Swiss law, and to the jurisdiction of FIFA, its member federations and CAS, can constitute a restriction on the freedom to provide services only if the rules thereby applicable to agents are themselves such as to dissuade them from carrying out their activity in another Member State. That is an evidential question, and it is Mainz’s to answer.

Whether the identified obstacles can be justified is also returned. The Court set out the legitimate public interest objectives available: avoiding conflicts of interest; setting basic ethical standards and protecting players and coaches, particularly at the start of their careers, from abusive practices by agents; ensuring a higher level of protection for agents’ clients and for agents themselves by establishing a uniform legal framework with supervision by a single decision-making body; and guaranteeing the integrity of the transfer system and of sporting competitions more broadly.

Read What Is There Callout

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The remuneration cap is listed among the contested rules. CURIA's press release records no cap-specific conclusion, and the cap does not appear among the three obstacles to freedom to provide services identified in that press release. This article therefore does not say that the cap survived, fell, was approved or was struck down. Any cap-specific conclusion should be based on the full judgment in an official-language version.

The GDPR finding, and why it is the one that lasts

The data protection analysis produced the judgment’s clearest unqualified finding, and it has the longest tail.

The Court began by noting that the GDPR governs only the processing of data relating to natural persons. Whether the processing of the personal data contained in the information agents must communicate to FIFA is necessary for the purposes of legitimate interests -- and if so, whether the interests or rights and freedoms of the data subject override those legitimate interests -- is, again, for the referring court to assess.

On one point the Court went further, and without qualification: the GDPR precludes the disclosure and publication, by a federation such as FIFA, of any sanction imposed on agents or their clients, and of detailed information on all transactions involving agents.

That is not a criterion for Mainz to apply. That is a conclusion.

Its practical effect deserves more attention than it has received. The elements of FIFA’s transparency architecture that were most useful to third parties -- the sanctions record, and the transaction detail including remuneration amounts, made available to clubs, leagues, players, coaches and other agents -- are precisely the elements the Court has said the GDPR does not permit to be published.

Preliminary Ruling Box

What a preliminary ruling does and does not do

A preliminary ruling allows a Member State court to ask the Court of Justice about the interpretation of EU law or the validity of an EU act. The Court of Justice does not dispose of the underlying national dispute. The national court must decide that dispute in accordance with the Court\'s ruling, which is also binding on other national courts before which a similar issue is raised.

Case C-209/23 therefore does not, by itself, annul FIFA’s agent regulations as a whole. It provides the EU-law framework that the referring court must apply to the dispute before it.

GDPR Conclusion Scope Callout

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The Court's GDPR conclusion may narrow the personal data that can be disclosed or published. It does not, without more, establish that FIFA's entire agent platform must be removed or that all underlying processing is unlawful.

The intersect: two regimes moving in opposite directions

From 10 July 2029, EU Regulation 2024/1624 designates professional football agents as obliged entities under EU anti-money laundering law. There is no turnover threshold and no exemption route of the kind available to certain clubs. A sole practitioner with two clients in the French second division carries the same formal obligation to hold a framework as the largest multi-national agency. Separately, transactions with football agents and other intermediaries are one of the four categories that bring a professional club into scope in its own right. Agents are therefore both regulated entities and the subject of their counterparties’ due diligence.

Set that against what happened on 16 July.

1. Fragmentation meets harmonisation

The judgment leaves the Regional Court, Mainz, to apply the Court’s criteria to several contested rules. Other national courts are bound by the Court’s interpretation where a similar issue arises, although outcomes may differ where the facts and proportionality assessments differ. The matters left for national assessment include multiple representation, certain licence conditions, the approach rules and, conditionally, the forum and governing-law provisions.

EU Regulation 2024/1624 pushes the opposite way. It is a Regulation, not a Directive. It applies directly. AMLA sets standards and coordinates supervision across Member States, with the express purpose of removing the national divergence that characterised the previous directive-based framework.

So an agency operating across five Member States is on course to face one harmonised anti-money laundering standard and, potentially, five different answers on what it may charge and whom it may simultaneously represent. Football’s agent layer may therefore face greater uncertainty in the application of sporting rules while becoming more harmonised at financial-crime level. Those are not the same thing, and the second is considerably harder to litigate away.

2. Transparency contracts, due diligence expands

The GDPR finding precludes FIFA from disclosing or publishing sanctions imposed on agents or their clients and detailed information on all transactions involving agents, insofar as that information constitutes personal data relating to natural persons.

The obligation on a club to diligence its agent counterparty from 2029 does not shrink to match. If anything the reverse: a club conducting customer due diligence on an agent under the AMLR cannot lean on a governing-body register that has just been narrowed. The information still has to come from somewhere. In practice, it will come from the agent.

The agency that can produce, on request, a documented client due diligence file, a coherent commission flow analysis, a sanctions and politically exposed person screening record and a clean account of its own beneficial ownership will complete transactions. The agency that has been relying on FIFA’s platform to satisfy its counterparties’ curiosity will find the platform no longer does that work. This dynamic is already visible on the banking side, where correspondent banks ask the questions first and the regulators follow.

3. Fee divergence is an AML question, not only a commercial one

If the remuneration rules are ultimately narrowed or disapplied in one or more Member States, a possibility on which the press release reports no cap-specific outcome, the result would not be a return to a neutral status quo. It is jurisdictional divergence in how agent remuneration may lawfully be structured.

Agent commission flows already sit among the highest-scrutiny transactions in the sport: split payments, sub-agency arrangements, image-rights routing, third-party payment. USD 1.37 billion in men’s professional agent fees in 2025 is a transaction volume that attracts serious regulatory attention on its own terms. Divergent, jurisdiction-specific fee structures are exactly the pattern AML controls exist to interrogate.

An agency that structures a commission one way in Spain and another way in Germany because the two courts reached different conclusions is not doing anything improper. But it is generating a transaction profile that an AML analyst -- at a club, at a bank, or at a national competent authority -- will need explained. The explanation needs to exist before it is asked for, not after.

4. Relocation is not an exit

One prediction circulating since the judgment is that agencies will migrate toward Member States taking a more permissive line. Set aside whether that arbitrage works on the sporting rules. It does nothing at all on AML.

A relocated agency is still established in the Union. It is still an obliged entity from 10 July 2029. It is now supervised by the national competent authority of its new host state, applying standards coordinated by AMLA. Relocation changes the supervisor. It does not change the obligation -- and an unexplained change of establishment, in an industry the regulator already treats as higher risk, is not a neutral fact on a file.

What follows for agents, practically

Nothing in this judgment moves the 2029 date. What it changes is the environment agents will be operating in when it arrives. Four things follow.

Do not make readiness contingent on Mainz. The FIFA position may not settle for years, and across multiple jurisdictions it may not settle consistently at all. The obligations that attach to an agency on 10 July 2029 are fixed regardless of how the German court rules on multiple representation.
Assume you are the source of truth on yourself. The GDPR finding shifts the burden of counterparty knowledge from FIFA’s platform onto the agency. Your due diligence file has just become a commercial asset, not only a compliance artefact.
Document the commission structure before you need to defend it. Not because it is improper. Because the rationale for a structure is far easier to record contemporaneously than to reconstruct three years later for a bank that has already formed a view.
Treat divergence as a risk factor. If the post-judgment landscape produces materially different rules across the Member States you operate in, that divergence belongs in your business-wide risk assessment as a factor -- not in your commercial plan as an opportunity.

The banks are already asking questions. The regulators are next.

Lagom Sports Compliance is a specialist governance, risk, compliance and anti-financial crime consultancy built exclusively for professional football. We work with agents and agencies on the compliance wrapper that protects the business and keeps it bankable.

Football agents sit at the centre of the sport’s most complex financial flows: commission structures, multi-jurisdiction transfers, minors’ representation, image-rights vehicles, multi-party transactions. What we build for agents and agencies:

Client due diligence (players and clubs). KYC processes covering player onboarding, minor representation safeguards, UBO identification for image-rights vehicles, and risk-tiering based on nationality, jurisdiction and transaction complexity.
Commission flow analysis and documentation. Split payments, sub-agency arrangements and image-rights routing, analysed and documented against FIFA RSTP and EU AML transaction monitoring requirements.
Sanctions and PEP screening. Configuration and management of ongoing screening for agencies representing players from higher-risk jurisdictions or operating in transfer chains with significant sanctions or PEP exposure.
EU AML readiness for cross-border operators. Cross-border agencies active in EU member states face the same readiness imperative as clubs. We run the diagnostic, build the framework and support you through the readiness cycle.
Banking support. When your correspondent bank asks for AML documentation or raises concerns about your client or transaction profile, we prepare the response and attend the conversation.

Full detail on our agent and agency work: lagomsportscompliance.com/aml-compliance-for-football-agents

If you want an immediate read on where your agency stands against EU AML 2024/1624, start with the free assessment tool. It takes minutes and costs nothing.

The Regional Court, Mainz, must now dispose of the case in accordance with the Court’s decision. The AML deadline is not waiting for that outcome.