The 2009 Treaty of Lisbon corrected the apparent constitutional anomaly inherent in EU sports law which saw the EU play a significant role in shaping how sport is regulated in Europe without Treaty guidance informing how that should take place. For the first time in its history, the EU is now constitutionally competent to promote European sporting issues, ‘while taking account of the specific nature of sport’. As competences go, Article 165 is rather soft but as this book so skilfully explores, its significance lies in the recognition that European law exerts a considerable influence on sporting practices and that this influence should be respectful of, but not subservient to, the specific nature of sport. Fine words, but how can EU law respect the autonomy and specificity of sport whilst ensuring that sport, as with all other economic activities, operates within the limits of the law? This question has generated much literature, none finer than the work presented by Prof. Stephen Weatherill in this updated and expanded collection of his works. Since he first began writing in this area in the ‘distant 1980s’, Weatherill’s message has been consistent, persuasive and above all influential. His work reveals not only a deep appreciation of the peculiarities, and commercial realities, of modern sport but also a masterful dismantling of the widespread perception that European law is so beset with rigidities as to render its application to sport unworkable. Indeed, quite the reverse. Weatherill’s work, captured so brilliantly in this book, has educated a generation of sports professionals, lawyers and academics on how the EU’s legal order has offered sport sympathetic treatment, although as Weatherill highlights, not always in an entirely consistent way. Yet Weatherill also reminds us that sport is not so special as to expect, or merit, removal from legal scrutiny. Sport is not, and should not be, above the law. Again, fine words, but how to deliver this sympathetic treatment within the limits of the law? Weatherill’s treatment of the Meca-Medina doping litigation displays the author’s prescience. Less than satisfied with the reasoning of the Court of First Instance (now General Court) to dismiss the claim brought by two swimmers, Weatherill presented an alternative vision of how to reconcile sporting practices with EU law, a vision subsequently followed by the Court of Justice. Legal criticism is empty if one cannot present a coherent alternative.