Sports Agency Contract and the related Legal Issues

The Korean sports industry has developped so rapidly along with the peoples’ interest in the leisure culture, that its volume has amounted to 41 trillion Korean Won as of 2016. This figure outnumberd twice the revenue of the tourist industry. Notwithstanding such a progress, unlike the western world such as the U.S., the Korean sports industry could not overcome the poor environment in terms of protecting athletes’ rights and interests. This seems to demonstrate that laws and regulations related to sports agents, whom are supposed to perform for the protection of the athletes’ rights and interests, are still falling short compared to the western world. Even with the Sports Industry Promotion Act, which has been enforced on 4th August 2016, the act does not have specific and detailed regulations on the sports agents. As such, a question arises as to whether current laws regarding to the relationship between sports agents and athletes are proportinately regulated. If so, the principles related to the relationship between sports agents and athletes should be relied and interpereted based on the Korean Civil Code as a general norm. However, even though the Korean Civil Code could be relied on, the complicated legal problems, which might arise when the relationship between sports agents and athletes is ceased by a cancellation of the contract, should be resolved by the basic principles applied according to a special act, in order to balance their rights and obligaitons. This is because such complicated legal problems can not be resolved fully by the application of the Civil Code rather than according to a related special code. Therefore this essay has generally dealt with the sports agents system and a global trend and then scrutinized the basic principles with regard to the sports agents contract and the related legal issues when a sports agents contract is ceased, by examining relevant laws and Korean Supreme Court’s decisions.