A dispute over the shares, governance or assets of a sports club is a legal conflict like the struggle around any other legal person — and Georgia has no special court or statutory regime for such disputes in sport. This page explains the legal form the club and the federation carry under the Law on Sport, why their ownership disputes run through the general rules, and which norms create the frame within which those disputes are decided.
The Framework: The Legal Form of Sports Organisations
Under the eighth article of the Law on Sport, a public or other non-state sports organisation is a sports federation, association, club or other union that aims at the development of sport. The state fosters the development of these organisations' activity and involves them in the governance of sport; where necessary, the Ministry of Education, Science, Culture and Sport may transfer individual powers to them and control their exercise. Under the same article these organisations conduct their activity in accordance with the law and other normative acts in force in the sphere of sport. From this it follows that questions of ownership of a club or federation are decided by the general rules attaching to the relevant legal form: the sporting specificity shapes the frame but does not transform the disputed relationships. An investor buying into a club, a founder challenging a resolution or a member contesting expulsion all stand on the same civil-law ground they would occupy outside sport.
The Federation's Structure and Governance
Article 10 defines the status of the national sports federation of Georgia: it is a non-commercial legal person of private law established on the basis of the Civil Code, conducting its activity in accordance with the law, other normative acts, international sports federations and its own statutes. The federation is the sole governing body in the respective kind of sport and represents that sport both inside the country and abroad; its status is granted to the association whose founding documents satisfy the requirements of Georgian legislation and of the relevant international federation, and its competence extends over the whole territory of Georgia. Among the governance rules, note that the supreme body of the federation is the assembly, at least three quarters of whose members must be represented by sports organisations, and that the president may be a citizen of Georgia with higher education, high reputation and no criminal record. These requirements are precisely the points on which disputes most often turn: the composition of the assembly, the legality of the vote and the powers of the president. A challenge to a federation resolution therefore usually proceeds along two lines at once — the statutory line, testing the decision against the federation's own statutes, and the statutory-regulatory line, testing it against the composition and eligibility rules the law itself prescribes.