Introduction
In August 2022, Fédération Internationale de Football Association (“FIFA”) suspended the All India Football Federation (“AIFF”) from all international activities. India lost its right to host the FIFA U-17 Women’s World Cup. Its participation in global football governance was frozen overnight. Strikingly, the suspension had nothing to do with match-fixing, doping, or financial misconduct of any kind. The immediate trigger was the Supreme Court’s decision to constitute a Committee of Administrators (“CoA”) to manage the AIFF’s affairs during a governance crisis FIFA characterised as impermissible third-party interference under Article 19 of the FIFA Statutes.
The episode is worth sitting with for a moment. India’s highest court intervened to fix a governance crisis, and that intervention itself became the ground for international sanction. This is the central paradox, through which the National Sports Governance Act, 2025 (“NSG Act”) deserves to be read. The NSG Act is India’s most significant legislative intervention in sports administration in decades: it codifies binding obligations on elections, tenure, athlete representation, financial disclosures, and dispute resolution through a new National Sports Tribunal (“NST”). The central question, however, is not simply whether it improves domestic governance. It is whether the Act can be squared with a global regulatory framework that treats state‑anchored oversight itself as a breach of the autonomy member associations owe to FIFA.
This article argues that the NSG Act does not merely relocate the AIFF tension from the courtroom to the statute book. It crystallizes a structural conflict between two legal orders. On one side stands FIFA’s autonomy doctrine, developed within a transnational private legal order that requires national associations to “manage their affairs independently and without undue influence from third parties”, including governments and courts. On the other side stands Indian constitutional public‑function jurisprudence, which treats powerful sports federations as bodies exercising public duties and therefore subject to transparency, accountability, and judicial review, even if they fall outside Article 12 “State” status. The core claim advanced here is that these frameworks are not normatively co‑equal: where FIFA’s autonomy expectations conflict with Indian constitutional commitments to public accountability, the latter must be treated as doctrinally prior. The NSG Act is assessed accordingly not only as a governance statute, but as a site where a private autonomy regime and a public‑law order collide.
Indian sports federations as public-function bodies
Most of the Indian sports federations, including the AIFF, are registered as societies under the Societies Registration Act, 1860, or analogous state legislation. Despite their formally private character, these bodies exercise functions that are public in every meaningful sense, be it selecting national athletes, administering government funding, conducting national championships or representing India before international sporting bodies. Indian courts have progressively recognised this.
In Zee Telefilms Ltd. v. Union of India (2005), the Supreme Court held that private bodies performing public duties may attract judicial scrutiny even absent Article 12 status. Subsequently, in Board of Control for Cricket in India v. Cricket Association of Bihar (2015), the Court went further, insisting transparency, conflict‑of‑interest rules, and institutional accountability for sports bodies that exercise de-facto monopolies over national sport. These precedents arose in the context of cricket, but their logic does not stop at the boundary of one sport.
Once federations are treated as public‑function entities, Indian public law presumes that their decisions must be open to constitutional review. High Courts’ Article 226 jurisdiction over “any person or authority” performing public duties has operated as the primary vector for horizontal application of constitutional norms to private associations, including sports bodies. The Supreme Court’s resort to a CoA in the AIFF case was therefore not a doctrinal aberration, but an expression of this trajectory: where an association entrusted with public functions falls into governance paralysis, the Court considered itself empowered, if not obliged, to step in.
The cumulative effect of India’s public-law jurisdiction over sports federations is to progressively narrow the space within which such bodies can claim unreviewable domestic autonomy, even as FIFA simultaneously insists upon that autonomy as a non-negotiable condition of continued international membership. The AIFF found itself caught squarely in the middle of this squeeze.
FIFA’s autonomy doctrine as a private legal order
FIFA approaches the same institutional landscape from a different starting point. Articles 14 to 19 of the FIFA Statutes require member associations to adopt statutes compatible with FIFA’s own, to manage their affairs independently, and to ensure that their decision‑making processes are protected from “undue influence from third parties”, specifically including governments and courts. Within this framework, national associations are expected to be self‑governing, politically neutral, and structurally insulated from state control.
This regime can further be described as a “private legal order”: a vertically integrated system in which FIFA, the confederations and the Court of Arbitration for Sport (“CAS”) generate an autonomous body that national associations are required to internalize, often by amending their own statutes and regulations. Disputes are to be channeled into internal committees or CAS, not domestic courts; domestic judges are expected to appear mainly as supporters at the margins, recognizing and enforcing arbitral awards rather than displacing internal decision‑making.
FIFA’s enforcement practice gives its autonomy doctrine a hard edge. It has threatened or imposed sanctions where governments dissolve football federations, replace elected leadership with state‑appointed committees, or use courts to control internal elections and appointments. The AIFF suspension is a paradigmatic example. From FIFA’s standpoint, the problem was not the substance of the CoA’s work. Conducting elections and amending statutes are exactly what an elected executive is supposed to do. The dispute was in the identity of the decision‑maker: a body created by the Supreme Court, deriving authority from state power rather than from the federation’s own consent.
Seen through this lens, the decisive line for FIFA is not between good and bad governance, but between private, association‑based self‑government and oversight that ultimately flows from state authority. Third‑party bodies whose jurisdiction is grounded in consensual arbitration clauses or contractual submission, such as Sport Resolutions in the United Kingdom, which operates as an independent, non‑statutory dispute‑resolution service based on voluntary referral, are tolerated because the association remains the source of the body’s authority. By contrast, judicially imposed committees or statutory tribunals with compulsory jurisdiction over elections and governance are presumptively suspect, even when they improve integrity on the ground.
Conceptually, then, FIFA’s autonomy doctrine is best understood as a jurisdictional claim within transnational private law. Member associations voluntarily enter a dense network of contractual and constitutional‑style obligations in which they promise to shield football from political control, including control exercised through courts and legislatures. Whatever its merits as a shield against state capture, the doctrine draws its authority from private ordering and party autonomy, not from democratic authorship or constitutional entrenchment.
The NSG Act at the fault-line
Placed at this intersection, the NSG Act does two things at once. Domestically, it gives content to the public‑function understanding of sports federations by legislating governance norms and creating a National Sports Tribunal (“NST”) to hear disputes that previously went directly to constitutional courts. Transnationally, however, it embeds state‑anchored oversight mechanisms in precisely the domains of elections, internal disputes, and financial control, all of which that FIFA’s autonomy doctrine seeks to keep within the self‑governing sphere of national associations.
The electoral supervision mechanism is the most legally sensitive provision. Article 19 of the FIFA Statutes contemplates that member associations will self‑organize and administer their elections; FIFA’s third‑party interference guidance treats external control over electoral processes as a core violation. A statutory regime in which elections are supervised or effectively validated by an external, state‑constituted body risks being characterized as indistinguishable from the CoA intervention that triggered the 2022 suspension. That risk persists even if the supervising body is formally independent and even if its involvement is limited to ensuring compliance with statutory norms.
The NST is more ambivalent. If it had existed in 2022 as a credible domestic specialist tribunal, the AIFF dispute might have been resolved without recourse to the Supreme Court, potentially avoiding the direct trigger for FIFA’s sanction. Yet because the NST is created by statute, funded through public resources, and vested with jurisdiction as a matter of law rather than contract, it will almost inevitably be read within FIFA’s framework as an instrument of state oversight. A more autonomy‑compatible design, as comparative experience suggests, would ground the NST’s jurisdiction in voluntary submission by federations and participants, akin to commercial or sports arbitration rather than in across‑the‑board statutory compulsion.
Comparative practice makes this fault line clearer. In the United Kingdom, Sport Resolutions derives its authority from contractual clauses and voluntary referral by national governing bodies; there is no general statute forcing federations into its jurisdiction on governance questions, and domestic courts typically confine themselves to the limited supervisory role associated with arbitration law. In Australia, the National Sports Tribunal (NST‑Australia) is established by statute but operates largely on the basis of sports and athletes agreeing via their policies, to use it with a core focus on anti‑doping and integrity, not internal electoral design. Both models show that third‑party dispute resolution is not per se incompatible with FIFA’s autonomy standards, provided that (i) jurisdiction is ultimately grounded in the association’s consent and (ii) the tribunal’s core mandate targets integrity and discipline rather than the composition of elected leadership.
The Indian NSG Act borrows neither discipline. Its NST is conceived as a general governance tribunal; its electoral provisions rely on statutory authority rather than voluntary uptake. In doing so, the Act tracks domestic constitutional demands for accountability but moves further away from the private‑ordering logic that makes the UK and Australian mechanisms tolerable within FIFA’s autonomy framework.
Constitutional supremacy, democratic deficit and the need for protocol
At this point, the conflict might be framed as a clash between two legitimate projects: FIFA’s desire to insulate football from political interference and India’s insistence on public accountability for bodies exercising public functions. That symmetry is tempting but misleading. From a domestic constitutional perspective, the two orders do not stand on the same normative footing. FIFA’s autonomy doctrine, whatever its functional virtues, is a product of private governance with limited internal democracy and weak external accountability; Indian constitutional norms are the expression of a legal order that claims, and is treated as possessing, supremacy over the exercise of public power within Indian territory.
On the argument advanced here, Indian courts and legislators are not at liberty, as a matter of constitutional fidelity, to treat FIFA’s expectations as overriding domestic commitments to transparency and accountability. They may prudentially choose to adjust institutional design, by limiting compulsory NST jurisdiction, by structuring electoral supervision more lightly, or by encouraging contractual submission to specialist tribunals to minimize the risk of sanction. But these choices must be defended, and defended explicitly, as accommodations made within a constitutional hierarchy in which public‑function accountability remains prior.
This perspective also sharpens a critique that the NSG Act only hints at: FIFA’s autonomy doctrine itself is democratically problematic. A private association headquartered in Zurich effectively claims the authority to veto how national courts and legislatures choose to structure oversight over bodies that control access to publicly funded sport, national symbols, and significant economic and social resources. Even if one accepts that some insulation from politics is desirable, it is difficult to justify, in democratic terms, a regime in which domestic constitutional choices about transparency, tenure and dispute resolution are constrained by the threat of suspension issued by a body with no direct lines of accountability to the affected citizenry.
Recognizing this does not alter the practical reality that India cannot ignore FIFA without risking exclusion from global football and undermining ambitions such as a 2036 Olympic bid. It does, however, dictate how the NSG Act should be complemented. A bespoke bilateral governance protocol with FIFA and, where relevant, with the International Olympic Committee (“IOC”) emerges not merely as a prudent policy instrument but as a doctrinally necessary device for reconciling a subordinate private legal order with a superior constitutional one. Such a protocol could, for example, recognize the NST as a competent forum for governance disputes on the basis of federations’ voluntary submission, clarify the scope of statutory electoral oversight in terms compatible with the self‑administration principle in Articles 14-19, and acknowledge India’s constitutional obligation to ensure public‑function accountability within its own territory.
Conclusion
The NSG Act is, on any view, an important statutory intervention. It gives legal form to the public‑function character of Indian sports federations by legislating governance norms and by creating a specialist tribunal to hear disputes that would previously have gone only to constitutional courts. Read alongside Zee Telefilms and the BCCI jurisprudence, the Act confirms that entities such as the AIFF can no longer plausibly be treated as private clubs operating outside the reach of public‑law accountability simply because they are registered under nineteenth‑century societies legislation.
At the same time, the AIFF suspension and FIFA’s broader enforcement practice demonstrate that this constitutional trajectory sits in direct tension with a transnational private legal order that conditions continued participation in global football on strict adherence to association autonomy and non‑interference. The NSG Act entrenches public‑law oversight domestically but does not, by itself, resolve how that oversight will be read within FIFA’s autonomy framework. It therefore crystallizes, rather than dissolves, the fault line between a constitutional order that insists on transparency for public‑function bodies and a private order that treats many of the same oversight mechanisms as presumptively illegitimate.
Whether the NSG Act ultimately functions as a durable settlement or merely as the prelude to the next suspension will depend on whether policymakers treat it as an endpoint or as part of a larger project of re‑ordering the relationship between global sports autonomy and constitutional supremacy. If India is to avoid replaying the AIFF episode in higher‑stakes settings, it will need to insist, through both law and diplomacy, that participation in global sport is conditioned not on the abdication of core constitutional norms but on finding institutional designs that embed autonomy within, rather than outside the Constitution.
(This post has been authored by Adamya Singh and Shubham Tunwal, 4th Year B.A. LL.B. (Hons.) students at National Law Institute University (NLIU), Bhopal.)
CITE AS: Adamya Singh and Shubham Tunwal, ‘Between Statutory Oversight and FIFA Autonomy: Examining Indian Football Governance after the National Sports Governance Act, 2025’ (The Contemporary Law Forum, 1 September 2026) <https://tclf.in/2026/09/01/between-statutory-oversight-and-fifa-autonomy-examining-indian-football-governance-after-the-national-sports-governance-act-2025/> date of access.