Legal Regulation of Labour Relations with Athletes and Coaches: Features, Problems and Development Perspective

Legal regulation of labour relations with professional athletes and coaches in modern Russia is far from perfect. Labour legislation has a lot of gaps and conflicts that cannot provide a high level of stability of labour and other directly related relations between the employer, athletes and coaches. At the same time, the stabilization of these relations is necessary for the achievement of high sports results and gaining authority on the world stage. For a comprehensive study of issues of the work, a deep comparative legal analysis of legal status of professional athletes and coaches as employees in Russia and abroad, the specifics of employment contracts with them, as well as the specifics of the consideration of disputes from labor relations was carried out. At the moment, quite a lot of issues have been identified in legal regulation of labour relations of athletes and coaches. However, despite numerous proposals of potential solutions, the necessary changes are being made extremely slowly. Current problems of modern legislation include lack of legal consolidation of the definitions of the concepts of "sports regime", "professional athlete" and "professional coach". In addition, the coronavirus pandemic has shown that the employment contract with athletes and coaches must include a condition for suspending the duration of the employment contract due to force majeure, while paying for this time as downtime for reasons beyond the will of the parties. Also, the Russian legislation does not regulate sufficiently the issue of transfers of athletes, which are constantly realized in practice. There is no indication of the transfer procedure, which document it is fixed with, its subject, and so on. Moreover, it is possible to observe the competition of legal norms, especially when deciding on the dismissal of a pregnant female athlete who has used or is using doping. All these issues can be resolved quick enough, especially in case of understanding the experience of foreign countries and the adoption of a special Sports code in the Russian Federation.