When Geopolitics Disrupts Sport: The Case for a Dedicated Contractual Clause

The horrific terror attack in Pahalgam on April 22, 2025 brought into sharp focus something that sports lawyers have been quietly worried about for years: the inadequacy of standard contractual frameworks when geopolitics erupts without warning.

Within days of the attack, Indian crew members working at the Pakistan Super League ceased providing services. FanCode, which held broadcasting rights for the PSL in India, pulled all PSL content from its platform. Questions emerged about whether Pakistan's hockey and women's cricket teams would be permitted to travel to India for upcoming tournaments. These disruptions happened fast — faster than any contractual dispute resolution mechanism was designed to handle.

Why Force Majeure Falls Short

The instinctive legal response to such disruption is to reach for the force majeure clause. Under Indian law, force majeure is governed by Section 32 of the Indian Contract Act, 1872, which deals with contingent contracts. The Supreme Court in Energy Watchdog v. Central Electricity Regulatory Commission held that where a contract expressly or implicitly contains a term under which performance is discharged under certain circumstances, that discharge is governed by Section 32.

Force majeure clauses typically cover wars, acts of terrorism, government restrictions, natural disasters and pandemics. But they have a critical limitation: they address the inability to perform, not the unwillingness to perform. In many geopolitical situations — an India-Pakistan standoff, a Russian exclusion from European competition, a Chinese app ban — a party may be entirely capable of performing but deeply unwilling to do so. The law does not easily protect unwillingness.

Frustration Is Not Much Better

The doctrine of frustration under Section 56 of the Indian Contract Act offers another avenue, applicable where a subsequent event makes performance impossible. But as the Supreme Court noted in Energy Watchdog, frustration requires the event to change the circumstances so fundamentally that performance becomes impossible — not merely commercially inconvenient or reputationally uncomfortable. That is a very high bar in most geopolitical situations.

The Gap: Reputational and Policy-Based Unwillingness

The Wimbledon ban on Russian and Belarusian players in 2022, and UEFA's suspension of Russian clubs — which ended up at CAS — illustrated something the standard contractual toolkit cannot address. CAS ultimately upheld UEFA's actions as reasonable, proportionate and necessary, describing them as falling within UEFA's discretionary powers. But that discretion exists within an international sporting body. In a commercial contract between a sponsor and a franchise, no such institutional discretion exists. There needs to be a clear contractual source of power.

Vivo's exit from the IPL title sponsorship during the India-China standoff is the clearest Indian example. Vivo was not unable to perform. It was unwilling to — for reasons of national sentiment, regulatory risk, and brand exposure. Standard force majeure language offered no clean path.

A Proposed Geo-Political Clause

Having worked through these issues across several cross-border sports and gaming transactions, I believe there is now a pressing need for a standalone geo-political clause in sports and gaming contracts. The clause should achieve three things: a clear definition of what constitutes a geo-political event, a right to suspend performance during the event, and a right to terminate if the disruption persists.

For the definition, I would go beyond the standard armed conflict and sanctions language to include deterioration in diplomatic ties, legislative action restricting transactions with counterparties of a particular nationality, and — critically — any circumstance where continued performance would be incompatible with public positions adopted by a party's government or be reasonably perceived as insensitivity to national interest. That last limb is designed to capture situations like Vivo and FanCode, where the issue was not legal impossibility but reputational and political exposure.

For suspension, the clause should give either party the right to suspend on written notice during the geo-political event, whether performance is hindered or whether it merely creates reputational or regulatory misalignment. For termination, a thirty-day threshold for prolonged disruption is a reasonable trigger.

Conclusion

The sports and gaming industry operates in a world of strict rules — where being overweight by 100 grams can cause disqualification. It should not take a terror attack to remind us that geopolitical disruption deserves equally precise contractual treatment. Each transaction will have its own peculiarities, but the framework is ready to be built. The time to do it is before the next disruption, not after.