Professor Stephen F. Ross welcomes three renowned international scholars to Sports Law class

UNIVERSITY PARK—Professor Stephen F. Ross left his Sports Law class on September 1 trying to recall a better teaching experience in his 41-year career (the last 21 at Penn State Dickinson).

This year’s class theme is a comparison of the chaos in American college football and in global soccer. Class No. 3’s specific focus was on European soccer. Modern technology allowed his Sports Law students, including American J.D. candidates and LL.M students from Spain, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Colombia, to hear from three Spanish sports law titans.

Professor Sergio Gonzalez Garcia from the University Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid is Ross’s co-author of a Spanish-language treatise on global sports law as well as several recent articles on these developments. His mentor—the “dean” of Spanish sports law—is Professor Miguel Cardenal Carro, who also served as the Minister of State for Sports in the Spanish government a decade ago. Finally, another of Cardenal’s students, Dr. Emilio Garcia Silvero, joined from Miami, where he works as FIFA’s chief legal and compliance officer.

These guests shared their perspectives on the problems facing soccer, and Garcia Silvero briefly highlighted a brilliant strategic success he orchestrated where all litigation against FIFA regarding labor market regulations was halted and representatives of players, clubs, and leagues all around the world agreed to a five-year Social Dialogue to seek a collective agreement on these issues.

Penn State Dickinson Law’s international program facilitated this entire success. Ross’s collaboration with Gonzalez began with the first of several trips to Penn State by Gonzalez as a visiting scholar.

The welcoming and positive experience that he enjoyed led to another student of Cardenal’s, Maria Josefa Garcia Cirac of the University of Salamanca, to spend an entire academic year at Penn State in transitioning back to the academy from a career in government, where she served as speaker of the legislature of the provincial government of Castile y Leon. Her friendship with Garcia, in turn, led to many collaborations with him (last February, Ross led a seminar for FIFA’s legal team on differences between European and American sports law).

Stephen F. Ross is Lewis H. Vovakis Distinguished Faculty Scholar; Professor of Law; and Executive Director, Penn State Center for the Study of Sports in Society. Professor Ross teaches and writes in the disparate areas of Sports Law, Comparative Constitutional Law, and Statutory Interpretation.