• Professional football has been added to a list of activities that the European Commission considers should be monitored by Member States to prevent money laundering. ‘Professional football’s complex organisation and lack of transparency have created fertile ground for the use of illegal resources’, reads Supranational risk assessment of the money laundering and terrorist financing risks affecting the Union, published on 24 July. ‘Questionable sums of money with no apparent or explicable financial return or gain are being invested in the sport’. The list advised that Member States should consider which actors within football should be obliged to report suspicious transactions, and what requirements should apply regarding registration of the origin of account holders and the beneficiaries of money. Football was one of four new risk areas added to the list, along with privately owned automated teller machines; free ports; and investor citizenship and residence schemes.

• Spain’s Directorate General for the Regulation of Gambling (DGOJ) has passed a Resolution preventing gambling operators licensed in Spain from offering odds on sporting events involving minors, it announced. The Resolution prevents such operators from offering odds on sporting events that involve ‘mostly or exclusively’ minors, which it defines as people under the age of 18.

• The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has ruled that the Rules of the German athletics federation (DLV) cannot prevent other EU nationals from competing in the German amateur championships. On 17 June 2016, the DLV deleted Paragraph 5.2.2 of the Deutsche Leichtathletikordnung (German Athletics Rules), which allowed EU citizens to participate if they had an entitlement to participate for a German athletics association/athletics community and had had that entitlement for at least one year. The Rules were challenged by Daniele Biffi, an Italian national who has lived in Germany since 2003. Since 2012, has been affiliated to Germany’s TopFit club, and has participated in races. He challenged the rule after his registration for the national amateur championships was rejected in 2017.