FROM BOOKSTORE TO CAS: BUILDING BRIDGES ACROSS SPORTS DISPUTE RESOLUTION CULTURES

Dr. Roberto de Palma Barracco’s journey from finding a dusty sports contract book in São Paulo to becoming a CAS arbitrator reveals essential lessons about cultural bridging in international sports dispute resolution. His insights on vulnerability, transparency, and the future of ADR challenge conventional approaches to cross-border sports conflicts.

Executive Summary

In a recent episode of SCI TV’s Sports Conflict Advantage, I had the privilege of speaking with Dr. Roberto de Palma Barracco, whose remarkable journey from aspiring diplomat to CAS arbitrator and FIFA mediator illuminates critical lessons about cultural bridging in international sports dispute resolution. Roberto’s story begins not in courtrooms or arbitration chambers, but in a used bookstore in downtown São Paulo, where a dusty volume on football employment contracts sparked a career that would span continents, languages, and legal systems.

What makes Roberto’s perspective uniquely valuable isn’t just his credentials—though his resume spans from Sport Club Corinthians Paulista to CAS, from the University of São Paulo to the University of Oregon—but his lived experience navigating the cultural gaps that often determine success or failure in cross-border sports disputes. As someone who speaks Portuguese, Italian, English, Spanish, and French, and who has practiced across Latin America, Europe, and North America, Roberto embodies the cultural fluency that modern sports dispute resolution desperately needs.

This conversation revealed three critical insights for the future of international sports ADR: first, the primacy of soft skills and cultural awareness over technical legal expertise alone; second, the urgent need for transparency initiatives that transform arbitral silos into accessible precedent; and third, the untapped potential of expanding dispute resolution beyond traditional arbitration and mediation models. These themes challenge conventional approaches while offering practical pathways forward.

Roberto’s observation about cultural gaps in sports dispute resolution strikes at a fundamental challenge facing international sports governance. “There’s a cultural gap from what happens in Latin America in general, and Europe, or Latin America and North America,” he notes. “It’s rare to have someone able to walk all those spaces.”¹ This isn’t merely about language translation but about understanding how different legal cultures conceptualize jurisdiction, process, and fairness itself.

The transparency deficit compounds these cultural challenges. Roberto describes discovering sports law through a chance bookstore encounter because “there was no program, no classes on sports law whatsoever in any of the main universities in Brazil” during his LLB studies. This access problem persists today in different forms. While CAS maintains a database for its awards, Roberto points out that it’s “a database focused on arbitration sports, and FIFA is actually developing one relating to soccer.”² The fragmentation means practitioners and scholars lack comprehensive visibility into how disputes are actually resolved across different systems and cultures.

The soft skills gap represents perhaps the most underappreciated barrier. Roberto learned “the hard way” at Brazil’s National Dispute Resolution Chamber (NDRC) that law school teaches legal doctrine but not the cultural navigation essential for effective dispute resolution. “There are some things you just have to experience to learn,” he reflects. “Those soft skills only come with time.”³ This experiential learning requirement creates systematic disadvantages for practitioners from underrepresented regions who lack access to international dispute resolution forums.

The state-centric perspective dominating legal education further widens these gaps. Roberto’s discomfort with “state-centric perspectives” during law school led him to explore “non-state jurisdictions” that were “kind of arbitration, but not exactly arbitration.” This conceptual rigidity in traditional legal education fails to prepare practitioners for the hybrid, transnational nature of sports governance where FIFA’s regulations can override national law and CAS awards create de facto global precedent despite theoretically affecting only two parties.

Case Illustration: The Res Judicata Paradox

Roberto’s first academic paper examined conflicting awards between CAS and Brazilian courts regarding Corinthians—”not the same bodies and same issues… but in practice, they were conflicting.” This early work revealed how cultural differences in understanding jurisdiction create practical impossibilities for clubs navigating multiple legal systems simultaneously.

Roberto’s primary lesson for navigating cross-cultural dispute resolution is deceptively simple: “Ask questions.” He observes how often people enter rooms “not asking questions, simply trying to figure out by themselves what is happening.”⁴ This curiosity extends beyond information gathering to understanding how legal principles translate across contexts. When CAS lacks precedent on emerging issues, Roberto suggests looking to analogous situations: “If you know how case law works for that other specific topic, maybe you can figure out something that bridges that gap.”

The vulnerability Roberto discovered during his time in Eugene proves equally critical. “It was the first time that I was tagged as an underrepresented culture anywhere in my life,” he recalls. This experience forced him to ask questions he’d “never thought about when I lived in Brazil,” ultimately making him “comfortable being vulnerable.”⁵ This vulnerability contradicts legal training that conditions practitioners to project certainty and authority. Yet Roberto argues that acknowledging what you don’t know enables the curiosity necessary for effective cross-cultural practice.

Cultural awareness shapes dispute resolution mechanisms themselves, not just individual interactions. Roberto emphasizes understanding “how those different legal cultures end up influencing the dispute resolution mechanism that we have in each jurisdiction.” He notes it’s “pretty rare, if not nearly impossible, to have one single rule that applies to every single jurisdiction, or every single country, or every single sport.”⁶ This recognition demands tailoring resolution mechanisms to specific cultural contexts rather than imposing universal models.

The authenticity principle emerges as fundamental to Roberto’s approach. During our conversation, I suggested that “you don’t have to be slick… you just have to be authentic.” Roberto’s agreement reflects hard-won wisdom about the superiority of genuine engagement over polished performance. “Being prepared and being curious… those things matter more than just being super smooth and slick,” because slickness often masks rather than reveals the understanding necessary for resolution. This authenticity becomes particularly crucial when dealing with parties from different cultural backgrounds who may interpret performative confidence as deception or disrespect.

Roberto’s Framework for Cross-Cultural ADR Excellence

Roberto’s work on transparency initiatives at FIFA represents concrete action toward systemic improvement. His goal to “draft a report on all of the CAS decisions” recognizes that while arbitral awards theoretically affect only disputing parties, “we live in a broader sports community, one single dispute ends up influencing the whole system.”⁷ This transparency serves governance prevention functions, allowing stakeholders to understand boundaries and expectations without experiencing disputes themselves. As I noted in our conversation, transparency enables people to “behave and act within the expectations of the governance structure by better understanding what happens when people haven’t.”

The expansion beyond traditional arbitration and mediation models offers transformative potential. Roberto advocates for exploring “ombuds, but also dispute boards and other” mechanisms that are “not as impositive as arbitration.”⁸ While mediation has gained traction, particularly through FIFA’s initiatives, the broader ADR continuum remains underutilized. I’ve been discussing ombuds in sport for fifteen years, noting that while “change has been slow,” the potential for “people who can go around and help navigate the complexity of these governance structures with athletes and coaches” remains immense.

Artificial intelligence emerges as a critical enabler for improving dispute resolution access and efficiency. Roberto connects AI directly to the triage challenge: “If we’re talking about filtering things, we are talking about statistical analysis. If we’re talking about statistical analysis, we are talking about AI.”⁹ The technology could democratize access to precedent analysis, identify patterns across jurisdictions, and route disputes to appropriate resolution mechanisms. However, implementation requires careful guardrails to preserve the human elements—cultural sensitivity, emotional intelligence, relationship building—that effective dispute resolution demands.

Roberto’s vision for reducing access barriers focuses on streamlining the journey “from ‘hey, there’s something going on’ to ‘oh, finally I was able to deal with it.'” Currently, this path resembles “a mess, bundle of ideas, things, initiatives” rather than a coherent system. The solution requires not just adding more dispute resolution options but creating intuitive navigation systems that help parties identify appropriate mechanisms based on their specific contexts, cultures, and conflicts. This systematic approach could transform sports dispute resolution from an insider’s game to an accessible system serving all stakeholders.

Future Priorities for International Sports ADR

Roberto de Palma Barracco’s journey from that São Paulo bookstore to the highest levels of international sports dispute resolution offers more than an inspiring personal narrative—it provides a roadmap for systemic transformation. His emphasis on curiosity over certainty, vulnerability over invulnerability, and authenticity over artifice challenges fundamental assumptions about professional excellence in dispute resolution. These aren’t merely personal virtues but operational necessities for navigating the cultural complexity of international sports governance.

The transparency initiatives Roberto champions at FIFA, combined with his vision for expanded ADR mechanisms and AI integration, outline concrete steps toward democratizing access to sports justice. Yet implementation requires more than technical solutions. It demands practitioners willing to acknowledge what they don’t know, institutions committed to breaking down silos, and educational systems that prepare students for transnational realities rather than national mythologies.

As Roberto noted, every person he met in sports law was “super helpful… willing to have a coffee and talk.” This openness, combined with systematic improvements in transparency and access, could transform sports dispute resolution from an exclusive club to an inclusive system. The future Roberto envisions—where comprehensive databases enable learning, diverse mechanisms serve different needs, and AI enhances rather than replaces human judgment—is achievable. But it requires embracing the vulnerability and curiosity that his journey exemplifies, recognizing that the bridges we need to build aren’t just between legal systems but between human beings seeking fair resolution of their conflicts.

Sources

Note: All citations follow Bluebook format. For questions about specific citations, consult The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation (21st ed. 2020).

About the Author

Joshua Gordon, JD, MA serves as Woodard Family Foundation Fellow and Professor of Practice of Sports Business & Law at the University of Oregon and Senior Practitioner at the Sports Conflict Institute. Read full bio →

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