This is another battle won by Belenenses. The Constitutional Court rejected the appeal filed by Belenenses SAD, which contested the payment of footballer Nilton Varela’s training rights to the club, according to the judgment to which the DN had access. The case dates back to May last year, when an arbitration committee of the Portuguese Football Federation (FPF) sentenced Belenenses SAD to financial compensation amounting to more than 30 thousand euros to Belenenses , for rights to left-back training. The entity headed by Rui Pedro Soares then presented appeals against the decision to the FPF, which went to the Constitutional Court, as the DN went firsthand last October.
By this decision, the sports company is therefore ordered to pay the sum in question within 30 days from the date of notification by both parties.
According to Belenenses SAD, there were alleged unconstitutionalities in the FPF rules regarding training rightswhich would have been ignored by the arbitration commission, which led the SAD to take the case to the Constitutional Court. For the court, “the only conclusion attributable to the contested decision is that the arbitration commission was materially incompetent to decide the questions of constitutionality raised”.
Because, “it is only after the question of jurisdiction has been decided and the questions of constitutionality have been ruled on by the competent body, that the Constitutional Court, inspecting the rules applied in knowledge of these same questions, can pronounce a judgment likely to have repercussions on the decision then rendered in terms of the imposition of his reform”, one can read in the judgment to which the DN had access.
Nilton Varela did much of the training at the Cruz de Cristo club, having signed a professional contract with the Lisbon blue team in 2019-20, after the protocol between the club and SAD broke down. The 20-year-old is still part of the team. There are 17 other cases similar to this one, worth almost 400,000 euros from the club. On the SAD side, there are also more processes going on. “We have invoked in several cases the unconstitutionality of the FPF law and regulations on the right to training. The cases are at different stages, and in two of them we have appealed to the Constitutional Court ( TC),” he said at the time. DN Carlos Soares, lawyer and non-executive director of SAD.
Extreme positions of Clube and SAD in 2018, leading the professional team to leave Restelo and the club to form a new team. In October 2021, the Lisbon District Judicial Court ruled that the two entities no longer had an identity link.
