The many controversies at the highest level of the two major collective sports federations in France, football and rugby, led to the resignation of the two presidents Noël Le Graët (FFF) and Bernard Laporte (FFR). Sports Minister Amélie Oudéa-Castéra has announced the creation of a Sports Ethics Committee.
“I have taken the decision to set up a national committee to strengthen ethics and democratic life in sport, which will be set up soon and will be composed of unquestionably qualified personalities, coming from all walks of life, whose experience and complementarity of views will allow us to have the necessary perspective and the ambition for reform that we need”, she wrote in a column.
“Three axes”
He will make “next fall proposals around three axes: a governance of sport that is more ethical, more democratic and more protective of practitioners”. “This work will feed, after the Olympic and Paralympic Games (from July to September 2024, editor’s note), modifications to the legislative, regulatory and statutory framework to make the necessary improvements”, she adds.
Commenting on “the succession of crises in the governance of French sport”, “they all say the need to support concrete and definitive changes to strengthen the institutions of French sport”, she believes. And yet, a text on sport was voted on in March 2022 and includes measures concerning governance, such as more parity and a three-term limit for presidents of federations.
“Important advances”
One of the law’s rapporteurs at the National Assembly, LREM MP Céline Calvez, told AFP that a number of decrees necessary for the application of this law had not yet been issued, such as the expanded list of chronic diseases that can give rise to a prescription by prescription.
On the other hand, the decrees authorizing the creation of a commercial company for French football had been taken very quickly after the promulgation of the law. This text, defended by the former Minister of Sports Roxana Maracineanu, allows “significant progress”, according to Amélie Oudéa-Castéra. “I salute in this respect the deep work undertaken by the sports federations, with the support of the State, to put in place this renovated framework”, she praises in the tribune.