Ben Van Rompuy speaks at Congress of the International League of Competition Law
Dr Ben Van Rompuy participated as an invited expert in the annual Congress of the International League of Competition Law (LIDC), held this year in Vienna from 9 to 12 October.
The LIDC is a long-standing international organisation dedicated to the study and advancement of competition law, intellectual property law, and unfair competition law. Its 2025 Congress brought together academics, practitioners, and policymakers to discuss a range of current and emerging issues in these fields.
Van Rompuy contributed to a panel on the intersection of EU competition law and sports governance, moderated by Castillo de la Torre, Director in the Legal Service of the European Commission. Fellow panellists included Georgios Gryllos (Partner, White & Case), Marine Montejo (EU-qualified lawyer), and Fabian Larcher (Head of Legal Department, Austrian Ski Association).
In his presentation, he emphasised that sports-related competition law cases are distinctive not so much because of the nature of the product or the passions they evoke, but because of the central role played by public interest justifications. Although sports governing bodies are formally private entities, many of their regulatory functions pursue objectives of a quasi-public nature. Drawing on recent CJEU and Belgian case law, he highlighted a growing tension between the recognition of these public interest functions and the application of orthodox competition law principles. He therefore underscored the ongoing need for a context-sensitive framework capable of scrutinising the economic implications of regulatory restrictions not through efficiency-based metrics, but through their capacity to reasonably attain legitimate sporting objectives.
More information about the conference can be found here.