The lawyers who govern us: Sociography of an invisible body of experts: The case of the National Collective Sports Agreement

This text analyzes the often invisible but fundamental role of lawyers in the negotiation and drafting of the National Collective Sports Agreement (CCNS), signed in 2005. Although official negotiators—union and employer representatives—claim to prioritize the political or social dimension of agreements, the formalization of these agreements inevitably relies on a rigorous legal framework. The task of translating political language into positive law falls mainly to lawyers working behind the scenes. Through an ethnographic study conducted between 2012 and 2018, the strategic role of these lawyers, who are employees of representative organizations, in a hybrid space between law, sports, and professional relations is highlighted. Although they are marginalized in the legal field in the Bourdieusian sense, their technical expertise gives them real power to influence the joint committees (CMPs), where the texts are negotiated. These lawyers perform a dual mediation role: between the technical requirements of labor law and the political objectives of negotiators, but also between legal language and the need to make texts understandable and applicable to employers and employees in the sector. Their university education, social trajectories, and professional positions largely explain their influence in the discreet but decisive making of sports law.