PORTUGAL Trends and Developments Contributed by: Miguel Santos Almeida, Maria Novo Baptista and João Saúde, Sérvulo & Associados
competitions and events. In fact, Portuguese players are in 22nd place in the earnings table. Portugal was one of the first countries with a football federation that embraced eSports, adding a section therefor in 2017. The eSports section of the Portuguese Football Federation includes football teams licensed for online com - petitions but also clubs specifically created for online competitions. In 2018, one of the first eSports Associations was created in Portugal: the Portuguese Federa - tion of Electronic Sports. Despite the exponential development of the economy of eSports in Portugal, it is still a severely under-regulated sector of the sports industry. Commercialisation of Sports Events As for other members of the EU and the World Trade Organization, Portuguese jurisdiction allows for the exploitation of patents, trade marks, merchandising, copyrights, broadcast - ing rights, sponsorship and image rights. The owner of the above-mentioned rights var - ies depending on the sport in question. For example, in futsal and hockey, the respective sports federations are the exclusive owners of the merchandising, broadcasting, sponsorship and image rights – and the copyrights – of all matches played in the various competitions. Therefore, the commercialisation of these rights is undertaken by the sports federations, which can transfer or license the rights through written agreements. Conversely, in football, the television and mul- timedia broadcasting rights for matches in the first and second national men’s football leagues
are owned by the sports clubs or sports com - panies that participate in these competitions. Although professional Portuguese sports clubs currently sell these rights individually, as of the 2028–29 sports season, such rights will have to be jointly sold in terms to be defined by the Por - tuguese Football Federation by the end of the 2025–26 sports season, subject to approval by the Portuguese Competition Authority, as set out in Decree-Law No 22-B/2021 of 22 March. Following the entry into force of Decree-Law No 22-B/2021, the Portuguese League created Liga Centralização , an entity dedicated to studying, defining, proposing and supporting – before any public or private entity – a model for the central - ised marketing of rights. A centralised marketing model for television and multimedia rights is justified by the fact that the individualised marketing model currently adopted in Portugal allegedly promotes greater discrepancies between the various clubs in the league, insofar as it channels the majority of the revenues to larger clubs, which – due to their larger fan bases – receive larger bids for the marketing of their rights, to the disadvantage of smaller clubs. Although it may be claimed that this model is less attractive to larger clubs, based on the example of the main European leagues, the expectation is that it will tend to generate economic advan - tages for all clubs in the first and second national leagues, regardless of their size. With a better and more equitable distribution of the total value of television revenues, smaller clubs will have more capacity to invest in strengthening their teams, generating greater internal competitive - ness that is expected to make the competition more attractive and lead to an increase in other sources of revenue.
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