EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION
We are really pleased to present the second volume of our young Sports Law, Policy and Diplomacy Journal. It is already a success that we have managed to put together the first issue of our second volume, full of excellent papers from well stablished and upcoming academics and practitioners. We are extremely proud to include in this issue an opening paper by no other than Jean-Louis Dupont, the practicing lawyer that revolutionised EU sports law in 1995 with the Bosman case. He is also behind some of the most recent cases that have further transformed the application of EU law to sport following the CJEU rulings of December 2023. Having Jean-Louis Dupont in our journal is testimony to both our ambitions and the strength of the Sport&EU community to which the journal is linked.
But as we said in our opening editorial, this is not a sprint, this is a very long marathon, and we are completely aware that there is a lot of hard work ahead to fulfil our ambition of stablishing this free access journal as the outlet of reference for scholarly debate in the disciplines of sports law, sports policy and sports diplomacy in Europe. For that reason, we are extremely grateful to the authors that decided to submit their work to us. Similarly, we cannot thank enough our reviewers, without whose generous contribution the journal would not be possible. We have just reached the first kilometre of our very long run, so there are still many more to come.
Since we published our last issue we have received a good number of submissions, and we would like to encourage colleagues to keep having this journal in mind to disseminate their research. We are painfully aware of the pressures we are all under to publish in indexed journals, and therefore it will come as a welcome news that SLPDJ is already indexed in a number of prestigious databases and that we are working hard to be indexed in Scopus. But to get there we need your excellent contributions, so we can keep producing good quality journal issues like this one.
In the current issue we publish three papers that were first presented in the Sport&EU annual conferences of 2021, 2023 and 2024. We thank the authors for submitting their papers to SLPDJ, reinforcing the virtuous link between the leading academic conference on the study of European sport and the journal.
One thing that is extremely pleasing for us as founding editors of the journal is that three out of the five articles in this issue feature female authors. Similarly, we also see that two articles feature doctoral research of PhD candidates, the academics of the future in our disciplines. We are proud that both Sport&EU and our journal are attracting such a diverse range of authors, and that young upcoming academics find our review process constructive, fair, firm but friendly in the submission of their work.
We hope you find this issue useful, and that you can use the papers in your ongoing work. We look forward to discussing the issues raised in the papers with all of you in the future, either electronically or in person. If you have the opportunity, why not consider joining the debate at the 2025 Sport&EU annual conference in Naples next summer? A call for papers will be published soon.
Vanja Smokvina, Richard Parrish & Borja Garcia Garcia
Editors-in-Chief