The Leinster rugby team defeated the Vodacom Bulls, from Pretoria in South Africa, at Dublin’s Aviva stadium last weekend in their first league game of the season. Had the two participants been soccer clubs, they would have been sanctioned under a provision inserted in the statutes of football’s world governing body FIFA at its Paris conference in 1998. The provision prohibits clubs from forming transnational leagues. The European Court of Justice in Luxembourg will deterine next year whether the statute is in breach of European Union rules about competition and freedom of establishment. FIFA’s European offshoot, UEFA, is effectively the…

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