The biggest name to hit Ice Hockey in years?

MANCHESTER,U.K- Maros Kolpak, heard of him? You will. Maros Kolpak could well become one of the most important people in the sport of ice hockey of the last decades.
Kolpak doesn’t play ice hockey, I don’t even know if he can skate. He has no known affiliation to any team and may never even have seen a game, and yet he could be pivotal in not only our sport of ice hockey but that of others as well; indeed he is already well known in the cricket and rugby worlds despite not having anything to do with those sports either.
So who is this guy and why should we take notice of him? Kolpak is in fact a little known handball player of Slovakian origin. Handball is a sport even smaller in stature than ice hockey and yet this man has really shaken the sporting authorities across the European Union. Kolpak wanted to play in Germany, but being of Slovakian origin he would have been classed as an ‘import’, as such he and his club would fall foul of a number of rules not dissimilar to UK import player rules restricting the number of non nationals allowed. Not satisfied with this he decided to take the governing body of his sport to task. He won, in a landmark ruling handed down from the highest court in Europe on May 8, 2003 the court decided that in accordance with certain criteria certain players can no longer be classed as imports and as such no restrictions can be placed on their employment within the EU. So, if a sporting club within the EU decided to employ a player of EU origin there is no law that can prevent this and more importantly there is no restriction allowable in law by any sports governing body so as to put any kind of specification on such a player in order to limit numbers. In short, it is illegal to prevent any EU citizen from working in any EU country on the basis of a locally defined classification, or to place on employers, in our case the clubs, any restrictions that would act to prevent them from employing anyone they wanted and in any numbers they chose so long as they were EU nationals. Under the Kolpak ruling any such player is to all intense and purposes to be considered a ‘national’ of the country he is playing in and is to be treated as such. This does not mean they would qualify for the national team, that is an entirely different argument. All very interesting you say, but who cares? We have seen teams full of European players and they don’t pull any trees up over here because at the standard of player we can afford they are not much better.

True, but the more astute of you will also be thinking, hang on? Slovakia wasn’t in the EU in 2003! Again true, and although it is now a EU state it wasn’t when the ruling was handed down; so how did Kolpak win? In the ruling the courts accepted that Slovakia wasn’t at the time a member but were still keen to prevent limits on the free movement of labor, they probably also knew that membership was forthcoming who knows, the important thing is how they circumvented the membership issue in this ruling. The court decided that as well as EU nationals this right to be considered a national was to be extended to all countries that had an associate trading relationship with Europe. This is where it gets interesting for us, Kolpak established the right of persons from countries with ratified trading relationships with the EU to freely move and trade within member states and be classed as nationals not imports. I think you can see where this is going? The EU currently has ratified trading relationships with the US and Canada, so potentially there is no legal power to restrict any number of players from those and of course any EU country coming to play over here in any numbers the clubs want because they can no longer be classed as imports. There is the issue of wage caps to consider but it is widely suspected that the top British players take the thick end of a team’s wages budget certainly at EIHL level anyway. This is driven by the very fact that imports are limited and so the best Brits are a very sort after commodity. It is still however that in most cases even the lower salary commanding imports are widely regarded as better than all but the top five or six Brits so imagine being able to fill a team with them. How much better would the standard in the UK? Would we want it? and if we did, what of the other Brits?
There is a way to go yet, so far no one has tested our import laws now I don’t know why that is but one thing is clear, the EU ruling is pretty water tight and the legal opinion I have sought has indicated that any such testing of our in house regulation would have a high percentage chance of winning. The only point arguable is that the Kolpak ruling refers directly to ‘Associate trading relationships’ as criteria for being classed as a national, no so named relationship exists with either the US or Canada at this time although there is a raft of ratified trading agreements which are essentially exactly the same in all but name. It would have to be quite some legal argument to mark them sufficiently different in regard to this ruling. There is one more hurdle. All the above is fine and undoubtedly our sports local restrictions and classification on imports are almost certainly in contravention of the Kolpak ruling should they ever be tested, but in order to ply your trade in the UK as a foreign national you also need a work permit. Work permits are another locally set restriction, in that it is the sports themselves who decide how many are allowed. I have had it confirmed to me by the Border and Immigration authority that there are no restrictions at all placed on numbers by them. If any numbers of work permits are applied for and meet the criteria set out by them, any number of permits can be issued. The criteria in our case, and in fact all sports, relates to the amount of games played by the player the season before the application. The clubs undoubtedly agree to these restrictions on numbers but why? They must know how their product is struggling at this moment in time and in the current economic climate the struggle to attract your pound will only get harder. The biggest thing a sport can use to attract custom is quality; if it were simply a case of going to watch a game every rink in the UK would be full to bursting every weekend with people watching Rec hockey. Is it simply that they don’t realize that a way around the leagues restrictions exists? This is due primarily because the wider implications of the Kolpak ruling are not immediately apparent in fact I doubt many even know of it. But surely any way we can increase the quality of the product has to be looked in to doesn’t it? So if we could increase the number of better foreign players the quality has to go up and so the sports appeal would increase wouldn’t it? So will anyone be brave enough to have a go with this? That remains to be seen but if the sport is to not only survive but also thrive the quality has to be increased, especially given that many of us have seen a top class product in the defunct ISL era. Clubs may not want to go head to head with the governing body and be seen to be challenging the leagues right to set it’s own rules, but remember this is not about the leagues ability to set limits or rules it is about how a player is classified in law so this would not so much be a challenge as it would be a clarification. Should anyone peruse this and win it can only be good for the sport in the long run as competition for roster slots would be thrown wide open so over inflated wage demands on the basis of nationality would be a thing of the past, slots would be given on the only criteria that really matters – ability. The leagues ability to set limits on imports would remain intact we would simply be clarifying who exactly is an import. This article is not written with a view to starting forum arguments on the rights and wrongs of import limits and their implications for British players, I just wanted to point out that the very way a player is defined by our sport could well be unsupported in law and that should a club wish to increase the number of North American players it can employ, a legally tested method for doing so already exists. In short, Kolpak has determined that a player from a country with a ratified trading relationship with Europe cannot legally be classed as an import simply on the basis of a local rule. We have such agreements with the US and Canada. Also, there is no limit applied to any sport on the number of work permits it can have by the government.