*Saksham Agrawal

While AIFF v Rahul Mehra restores legitimacy to Indian sports governance and marks a much-needed judicial retreat from sports governance, its reasoning is far from perfect. The judgment often selectively defers to the NSGA, substitutes convenience for analysis, and legitimises irregularities in the name of stability, revealing cracks beneath an otherwise valuable judicial settlement.

Introduction

The Supreme Court’s decision in All India Football Federation v Rahul Mehra (‘AIFF’) arrives at the end of a long and uneasy chapter in Indian sports governance. The AIFF had spent years mired in administrative dysfunction: infighting, opaque elections, and a FIFA suspension in 2022 for third party interference with the threat of another one looming. In response, the Delhi High Court had appointed a Committee of Administrators to run the federation, only for FIFA to object to judicial interference. Hurried elections had been conducted under a draft constitution prepared by Justice L. Nageswara Rao. The Indian Super League was put on hold due to uncertainties related to the renewal of the Master Rights Agreement between the league organisers and the AIFF. It was into this chaos that the Court stepped post the passing of the National Sports Governance Act 2025 (‘NSGA’), to bring the matter to an end after the amici curiae brought it to the Court’s notice for relisting.

If BCCI V Cricket Association of Bihar had been the Court’s age of overreach, when judges styled themselves as custodians of national sport, AIFF marks its age of fatigue. The court that once tried to run cricket now walks away from the football field. The judgment presents itself as a work of restraint; in truth, it is a work of convenience. It replaces moral activism with procedural housekeeping and often uses the newly enacted NSGA as a shield for minimal reasoning.

The result is a patchwork of pragmatic fixes rather than a coherent jurisprudence. Its reasoning sometimes is uneven and, at times, non-existent. It rejects one line of argument in one issue, later embracing it in another to further its own reasoning and circularly justifies an interim committee becoming permanent in the name of stability. Before proceeding further, it is important to clarify that this critique does not dispute the AIFF judgment’s overall merit. It is, without doubt, a landmark decision that restores order and legitimacy to India’s sporting landscape; my concern lies only with certain aspects of its reasoning, where questionable outcomes are reached through fragile or inconsistent logic.

Analysis

The Court’s treatment of office migration reveals both its thin reasoning and its contradictions. In Issue 5, the court considered Rahul Mehra’s proposal that anyone who had completed a term in one national sports federation should be ineligible to hold office in another (para 60). It was a straightforward anti-capture measure, aimed at breaking the cycle of administrators rotating through India’s sporting bodies. The Court, however, dismissed it in a single line stating, “We find that accepting this suggestion might not benefit the federation and could be too onerous on sports administrators.” (para 60) That is not reasoning but evasion. The phrase “might not benefit” substitutes speculation for analysis; it leaves untouched the rationale for term limits, the equality concerns under Article 14, and the principle that public positions in federations exercising state-like functions must remain open and accountable. Its mention of the BCCI constitution refuting a similar suggestion misses the main concern of the cycle of administrators rotating through India’s sporting bodies (para 60). Reform is recast as inconvenience, and governance fatigue masquerades as judicial restraint.

Yet, only a few pages later, discussing Issue 7, the same bench reverses itself. In extending the AIFF Constitution to all State Associations, it invokes the very risk it had rejected. It extended the application to state associations and accepted the suggestion that if State Associations are left outside the framework, office bearers may migrate circuitously between national and state posts, evading the cooling-off and tenure limits prescribed (para 68). What was “too onerous” for individual administrators suddenly becomes “necessary” for institutional integrity. When reform threatens to displace actual power, it is burdensome; when it can be imposed as structural alignment, it becomes principle.

Next, the Court’s treatment of BCCI in Issue 10 is not restraint but evasion disguised as logic. Its entire reasoning that “distinguishing BCCI judgments only because BCCI is not an NSF, while AIFF is, does not yield any good” (para 90) pretends to settle a question it never asks. It reads like analysis but performs burial. The BCCI line of cases had built the constitutional foundation of Indian sports governance that bodies exercising public functions must satisfy the guarantees of fairness, equality, and transparency.

The incoherence deepens because under the NSGA, the BCCI is now explicitly recognised as an NSF. The Court, which cites the NSGA throughout the judgment to justify every conclusion when it can, ignores this single fact that collapses its distinction. Had the bench confronted it, it would have had to explain how the BCCI principles of autonomy, accountability, and judicial oversight fit within the new statutory regime. By refusing to substantively decide firstly, whether and secondly, how BCCI still governs, the Court leaves in a silence that pretends to be wisdom but is, in truth, exhaustion.

The Court’s reasoning in Issue 12 is the clearest instance of convenience masquerading as principle. It openly acknowledges that elections to the AIFF were held on 3 August 2022 under the draft Constitution prepared by Justice L. Nageswara Rao, as an interim measure pending final approval (para 96). These elections were conducted by a temporary electoral college and took place amid recorded objections and allegations of irregularities (para 99). Yet, rather than calling for fresh polls once the final Constitution was approved, the Court abruptly declares that the current Executive Committee can be treated as a permanent body which shall discharge its functions in accordance with the AIFF Constitution and relevant laws since fresh elections at this stage, with the term ending in September 2026, would be inefficient and destabilising (paras 100-101)

This logic is both factually inconsistent and normatively indefensible. It contradicts the Court’s own 2022 order that explicitly described the elections as “interim” and meant to preserve continuity only until a permanent framework was approved. Now, the same Court retroactively erases that qualification, transforming a temporary arrangement into a two-year tenure under the pretext of stability. The justification that a short remaining term makes elections inefficient is bureaucratic, not legal. The length of tenure has never been an exemption from legality.

More troubling is what this move represents. It is a reversal of the Court’s own logic in BCCI and earlier AIFF proceedings, where the principle of democratic renewal was treated as integral to sports governance. By refusing to order new elections under the approved Constitution, the Court rewards procedural irregularity and freezes accountability. The judgment treats the fact of incumbency as the source of legitimacy rather than its object of scrutiny. It is also violative of the NSGA that the Court defers to so often which is discussed below.

The reasoning is circular: the committee is legitimate because it exists, and it exists because the Court says so. The standard of legality collapses into administrative convenience. This not only undermines the Court’s own supervisory record but also sets a dangerous precedent for normalising irregular governance under judicial endorsement. What should have been the restoration of institutional democracy becomes, instead, a quiet entrenchment of the status quo.

Selective Deference to the NSGA

The AIFF judgment reads, in part, as an act of judicial self-erasure. The NSGA becomes a way for the Court to withdraw from the intellectual burdens of adjudication while preserving the appearance of legality. Each time the Act is cited, the Court is not applying it but merely using its provisions as ready-made conclusions rather than as questions demanding interpretation.

In the fourth issue, the Court approves a fourteen-member Executive Committee and the inclusion of “five eminent players (three male and two female)” simply because the NSGA has set a cap of 15 members (para 46). I agree with the Court’s decision to allow the 14-member expanded committee here but the Court’s abdication to the Act and non-reasoning becomes a problem where it would actually require scrutiny. In Issue 12, the NSGA’s express mandate of regular, democratic elections under approved constitutions was directly at stake. Yet, when deciding to allow the 2022 “interim” Executive Committee to continue until 2026, the Court never mentions the Act. It justifies its choice on grounds of efficiency and forgets the Act the moment it would compel accountability.

The same silence pervades Issue 10, where the Court does not acknowledge that under the very Act it defers to elsewhere, BCCI is now classified as an NSF.

By the time the judgment reaches its closing pages, the pattern is complete. The Court selectively invokes the NSGA in its post-issue amendments such as fixing the minimum age at twenty-five or endorsing quorum thresholds because these are mechanical, costless acts of rule-making that require no constitutional judgment.

The Future of Sports Governance in India

The AIFF judgment ends one chapter of judicial supervision but begins another of bureaucratic dependence. The future of sports governance in India will therefore depend on whether the NSGA becomes a living framework or a filing cabinet. The Act promises transparency, representation, and uniformity, but those promises risk collapsing into compliance checklists unless federations, and the courts that review them, treat governance as a question of rights, not procedure. The danger is already visible with AIFF suggesting that stability has replaced democracy as the organising value of Indian sport.

The game will proceed but whether it proceeds freely or falls into the old patterns of bureaucratic instability depends on how the NSGA is interpreted from here. The judiciary may have stepped off the field, but the decision it leaves behind will decide whether Indian sport finally learns to govern itself.

*Saksham Agrawal is a third-year student at the National Law School of India University, Bengaluru and an Editor at the Law School Policy Review and National Law School of India Review. His interests lie in sports and competition law.