August 18, 2026
By Faraz Shahlaei
In 2019, following Paris Saint-Germain’s controversial elimination from the UEFA Champions League against Manchester United, Neymar, PSG’s Brazilian football star, posted an Instagram story criticizing the referee’s decision to award a decisive penalty in the final minutes of the match. The story read:
‘This is a disgrace, they put four people who know nothing about football in charge of looking at the replay for VAR. It’s just not possible!!! How is a guy going to hold his hand behind his back. Go f**k yourselves.‘
UEFA subsequently sanctioned Neymar for insulting match officials, and the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) upheld a suspension of two matches. Neymar’s case is not an isolated one, and there are several other instances of sport governing bodies (SGBs) sanctioning sportspersons for public remarks that challenge SGBs’ authority or question their integrity (see e.g. here, here, here, here, here).
In the recent judgment of De Carvalho Marques and Others v. Portugal concerning criticism of football referees in Portugal, the ECtHR has articulated key arguments concerning the limits of such criticism. In particular, the reasoning of the Court offers valuable insights about sports as an issue of public interest. This blog post will be elaborating on such aspects and the broader questions that the judgment will raise.
The case of De Carvalho Marques and Others v. Portugal stems from six separate applications lodged against Portugal by two Portuguese nationals, Mr. Francisco José de Carvalho Marques (the first applicant) and Mr. Jorge Nuno Lima Pinto da Costa (the second applicant), alongside the Futebol Clube do Porto SAD (the applicant company). Mr. de Carvalho Marques was the communications director of the applicant company, and Mr. da Costa was the president of its board of directors (para. 1). The company was owned by the Porto Football Club.
At the heart of the dispute are public remarks made by the individual applicants via the club-controlled television channel ‘Porto Canal’ and daily newsletter ‘Dragões Diário’. The contentious statements, which were covered by third-party media outlets as well, targeted the Refereeing Council of the Portuguese Football Federation (PFF) and several named match officials, alleging that they have been corrupted by their rival club, Benfica, to manipulate match outcomes. The substance of the statements is crucial in the reasoning of the Court.
The first applicant in several instances made the following statements:
… the referees J.F., T.M. and F.V. had become international referees because of a monster [which had been] … created to control the referees and thus the outcome of competitions … no doubt about there being a backdrop to this, a [puppet master] which [went] by the name Benfica (paras. 122, 24).
‘in cahoots with Benfica’ and that ‘sporting truth [had been] grossly tampered with by the referee N.A.‘ (paras. 122, 36 above).
the referee J.F. had ‘completed the hat trick’, that referee teams had influenced the results of matches following a meeting between Benfica and the Refereeing Council, and that the results of the matches were a ‘consequence of the pressure, of the coercion that Benfica [wa]s applying to referees’ (paras. 122, 50, 54).
The second applicant also had made ‘several allegations of corruption and match manipulation made in respect of the refereeing system’ (paras. 122, 76, 83).
One application regarding the applicant company concerned a statement that ‘an octopus and a monster controlled Portuguese football and the Refereeing Council’ (para. 122, 24). Another application regarding the applicant company (App. 47902/20) concerned the following statement:
the referee B.P. ‘seem[ed] to have an issue with impartiality, and this m[ight] and should lead to his withdrawal from the matches which w[ould] decide the championship‘ (para. 122, 62, 71).
In response to these statements, the Disciplinary Council of the PFF initiated disciplinary proceedings against the applicants. The Board determined that the remarks unlawfully infringed upon the honor and reputation of the match officials, ultimately resulting in the imposition of various monetary fines and professional suspensions.
The applicants appealed the sanctions to the Sport Arbitration Court of Portugal (TAD), which in five cases upheld the decisions adopted by the Disciplinary Board. Regarding case 47902/20 and the statement of the applicant company, TAD quashed the decision adopted by the Disciplinary Council (para. 65), but the PFF appealed to the Central Administrative Court for the South (CACS), which confirmed the decision of the Disciplinary Board (para. 71). The appeals of the rest of the applicants to the CACS were all dismissed. Then all applicants sought leave to lodge extraordinary applications for review with the Supreme Administrative Court, but those requests were rejected. The applicants subsequently brought their grievances before the ECtHR. Recognizing the similar subject matter of the disputes and legal questions across the claims, the Court examined all cases jointly.
In their application before the ECtHR the applicants relied on their right to freedom of expression, claiming that their statements were views based on facts on matters of public interest and therefore protected under Article 10 ECHR. The Court considered that there were competing interests at stake in the case between the freedom of expression of the applicants and the right to respect for the private life of referees under Article 8 ECHR (para. 109). The Court’s task was to ascertain whether the Portuguese authorities had struck a fair balance between the applicants’ freedom of expression and the right to respect for the reputation of the referees and the Refereeing Council (para. 109).
The Court upheld that there was an interference with the freedom of expression of the applicants (para. 102-03), which was according to the Disciplinary Regulations of PFF and thus prescribed by law (para. 104) and followed the legitimate aim of protecting the reputation of football referees and football bodies (para. 105). The Court was not persuaded by the Government’s argument that the applicants’ actions had the potential to incite public disorder (para. 106).
The Court elaborated that a set of non-exhaustive criteria such as contribution to a debate of general interest, how well known the person concerned is and the subject of the statements in question, his or her prior conduct, the method of obtaining the information and its veracity, the content, form and consequences of the statements; and the severity of the sanction imposed will be considered when balancing freedom of expression and the right to respect for private life (para. 111).
The Court also distinguished between statements of fact and value judgments, mentioning that ‘existence of facts can be demonstrated, whereas the truth of value judgments is not susceptible of proof’ (para. 112). It continued that the proportionality of an interference with a value judgment may depend on the severity of sanctions and ‘whether there exists a sufficient “factual basis” for the impugned statement’ to prove that the statement has not been excessive (paras. 112-13). The Court clarified that such assessment will be conducted on a case-by-case basis (para. 112).
Regarding the case at hand, the ECtHR distinguished between the applications based on the nature of the impugned speech. Regarding five of the applications, the Court accepted that given the metaphorical and speculative language employed, the statements constituted value judgments lacking a sufficient factual basis to substantiate allegations of match-fixing and corruption. Because the domestic authorities appropriately balanced the competing interests under Article 10 criteria, no violation was found (para. 133-34). Conversely, in one case the Court found a violation of Article 10 since the statements of the applicant company merely questioned a referee’s impartiality without implying corruption (para. 128, 135).
Despite the longstanding uneasy relationship between sport and freedom of expression, the question of suppressing the freedom of expression of sportspersons by SGBs has historically escaped rigorous human rights scrutiny. This gap is exacerbated by the fact that CAS’s jurisprudence regarding the boundaries of free speech is inconsistent, and from a broader viewpoint, human rights arguments raised before CAS are frequently left under-analyzed. Therefore, a lingering question that remains is the degree to which the practice of sanctioning sportspersons by SGBs falls within the boundaries of free speech under human rights frameworks (see e.g. here, here, here and here).
This inquiry is twofold. On the one hand is the controversial practice of SGBs suppressing expression of athletes on the field of play regarding issues irrelevant to the sporting competition. The most recent example is the case of Vladyslav Heraskevych, the Ukrainian skeleton racer, who was disqualified from the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games due to a dispute over his gear. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) disqualified Heraskevych after he declined to substitute his custom helmet, which displayed portraits of compatriots killed in the war. On the other hand, there is the practice of SGBs sanctioning sportspersons for expressions against SGBs or their functions. The latter category has received comparatively little attention in the literature and forms the subject matter of the ECtHR’s judgment in De Carvalho case.
SGBs often punish different types of criticism of their officiating functions, be it leaving the medal on the podium and quitting the wrestling medal ceremony to protest the referees’ decisions, calling a tennis umpire a ‘liar’ and ‘thief’, confronting the football referee on the field and calling his decisions ‘a fucking disgrace’, publicly criticizing how a basketball game was officiated in the postgame media availability, or throwing a towel to the refereeing table after a volleyball match (see also the examples in the introduction).
SGBs justify these sanctions as necessary to protect officials from abuse, preserve public confidence in competitions, and safeguard the integrity of sport itself. Yet the ECtHR’s reasoning in De Carvalho suggests a different perspective. Rather than treating criticism of referees as inherently harmful to sport, the Court recognized that debates concerning officiating and sporting integrity form part of a legitimate public discourse. However, the content of the speech may define its protected status. Among the various strands of the Court’s reasoning, two considerations stand out in particular: the public face of sporting activities and the content of the expression at issue.
Perhaps, the most important holding of the Court was that manipulation of sports competitions is an issues of public interest (para. 116). Such holding implies that professional football today occupies a central place within public life. It attracts vast audiences, generates billions in revenue, influences national culture, and attracts significant media attention. Therefore, the integrity of sporting competitions (at least football in this case) transcends the internal affairs of sports organizations and becomes a matter of legitimate public concern. The widespread reactions (see e.g. here, here, here, here) to the recent proposal by FIFA’s president to sell stakes of the FIFA World Cup to private investors is a good example of how governance and integrity of sport resonate far beyond sporting institutions. The controversy underscored a broader perception that football is not merely FIFA’s property, but a shared social institution whose governance implicates interests extending well beyond the organization itself.
What emerges from the Court’s reasoning affirms the above understanding hat the organization and governance of high-level sporting competitions cannot be regarded as falling exclusively within the private sphere of SGBs and their leaders. Rather, many issues relating to their governance, including integrity, transparency, and accountability, form part of a public debate that can warrant the application of “a higher threshold for restricting the right to freedom of expression” (para. 119) in sports.
Equally significant was the Court’s treatment of referees themselves. Referees’ decisions can determine sporting outcomes, affect substantial economic interests, and become the subject of intense public discussion. The recent 2026 FIFA World Cup, contained several officiating controversies, which sparked intense public debates, including the controversial reversal of a red-card suspension imposed on a U.S. player following reported intervention by the President of the United States. According to one commentator: ‘A reasonable person, not a conspiracy theorist, could look at half-a-dozen of the games in this World Cup tournament and have genuine doubts about the integrity of the sport’. The Court in De Carvalho recognized that elite referees occupy a position that inevitably exposes them to public scrutiny in light of the impact of their decisions and their role in football matches (para. 118). Consequently, the limits of acceptable criticism directed at referees in their officiating capacity are wider than those applicable to ordinary private individuals (id). This reasoning is notable because it places referees, the refereeing system and refereeing bodies closer to other public actors whose conduct may legitimately be scrutinized in democratic discourse.
A broader reading of the judgment suggests that the Court’s reasoning has the potential to be extended to the institutional structure of SGBs and their leaders. SGBs regulate virtually every aspect of sporting competition and exercise considerable authority over athletes, clubs, and other stakeholders. The heads of SGBs occupy positions of significant influence and responsibility, serving as the principal decision-makers and public representatives of organizations that govern the sporting ecosystem, a role expressly acknowledged by the Government in this case (para. 117). Given this regulatory function and the public significance of their activities, statements made by sportspersons about SGB’s structures and functions, their leaders, and their decisions are matters concerning the governance and integrity of sport, contribute to a debate of public interest, and should be considered protected speech.
What proved to be the fault line between a protected speech and an excessive one in De Carvalho was the content of the statements. The Court identified all imputed statements as value judgments, which needed to be constituted on a sufficient factual basis (para. 125).
In five cases the Court found that expressions were ‘extremely serious’ since they included specific and detailed accounts that criminal offences had been committed by some named individuals (para. 126). The Court also found the accusations of corruption and match manipulation can be damaging for the personal and professional reputation of referees and, therefore, should be based on sufficient factual basis (id.) which the applicants failed to prove the reasonableness or plausibility of their allegations (para. 129). According to the Court the ‘mere refereeing errors or irregularities’, even if repeated over time, cannot constitute, on their own, sufficient evidence of the existence of corruption or manipulation (para. 130).
Conversely, regarding the content of one of the statements by the applicant company that concerned the lack of impartiality of the referee B.P. without any implications of corruption or manipulation, the Court found the speech within the limits of acceptable criticism (para. 128, 131).
Be that as it may, where criticism directed at SGBs is grounded in a sufficient factual basis capable of supporting its plausibility and does not amount to unsubstantiated allegations of corruption, criminal conduct, or similarly serious and excessive speech, such expression falls within the scope of protection afforded by freedom of expression guarantees. In these circumstances, disciplinary sanctions imposed by SGBs on athletes or other sportspersons for expressing such views may constitute an unjustified interference with their freedom of expression.
Viewed through this lens, many of the above examples concerning the sanctions imposed on sportspersons for expressive conduct take on a different meaning. The reasoning of the Court suggests that restrictions previously regarded as matters of private sporting regulation may instead implicate important freedom of expression concerns. This is particularly relevant since FIFA is headquartered in Switzerland and subject to the jurisdiction of the ECtHR.
The ECtHR’s judgment in De Carvalho case challenges a long-standing tendency within sports governance to equate dissent with misconduct. A robust public debate is an essential component of legitimacy for SGBs. The ECtHR’s judgment suggests that Freedom of Expression may have a larger role to play in achieving those objectives than sporting authorities have traditionally been willing to acknowledge.
Looking ahead, the decision adds another chapter to the growing body of jurisprudence recognizing the public dimensions, functions, and societal significant of sport. It may reshape the way disciplinary measures imposed on athletes, coaches, officials, and other sportspersons for critical speech are assessed under human rights standards. Statements concerning the integrity, governance, transparency, and administration of sport can no longer be viewed solely as internal matters falling within the autonomous regulatory sphere of SGBs. If public debate concerning sporting integrity deserves protection, athletes and other sportspersons should not be sanctioned merely for expressing critical views on such matters, even in a harsh manner and with a hostile tone (para. 118), provided that their speech remains within the limits of acceptable criticism.
Strasbourg Observers is an academic blog that discusses recent developments at the European Court of Human Rights. The editorial team of Strasbourg Observers is based at the Human Rights Centre of Ghent University and the Centre for Government and Law of Hasselt University.
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