Knowledge

José Miguel Albuquerque, senior associate at TELLES and current President of the Portuguese Sports Law Association (APDD), speak to Agência Lusa about the possible consequences for Portuguese clubs in European competitions if scheduled matches are postponed due to a lack of police.

The TELLES lawyer, specialized in sports law, anticipates that if the regulatory mechanisms for rescheduling European games are exhausted "clubs could be punished with the sanction of defeat if there is no match in Portugal for any european competition due to a lack of policing. This would mean changes to the calendars of teams playing in other leagues, but they wouldn't necessarily have to readjust. I think it's possible that the competition could simply go ahead. It's not that it would be the ideal scenario, but I don't see a solution either."

At a time when protests by the security forces, who are demanding that their professional category be upgraded, have become more intense, José Miguel de Albuquerque added that "the police can and should fight for the rights they want, but they could have done it differently, namely by anticipating that there would be no match and no police officers deployed, so there would have been no point in anyone going there. Maybe we could have avoided some of the problems and images we saw. This is not to say that the absence of police justifies such behavior. It's obvious that it doesn't, but we would have avoided the whole movement of that mass of people to a place that quickly becomes a context of risk and insecurity."

Read the news published by Expresso, Record, A BOLA, Correio da Manhã e SAPO.