Announcing the OPIL World Cup Challenge

In nearly 20 years of legal publishing nobody has ever sent me a proposal for a book on football and international law. It’s not like there is any lack of international legal issues to be addressed – dispute settlement, IP, workers’ rights, corruption – the list goes on.  Perhaps many of the issues are more matters of private than public law but with the ongoing blurring of that distinction it could equally be the case that the time is ripe for a thorough scholarly investigation.

In an effort to marry up interest in public international law and football, and also to provide a bit of a distraction from all the sports coverage, we have devised the Oxford Public International Law World Cup Challenge. The concept is straightforward; hopefully the questions are less so. The questions are all about international law, and the answer to each question is the name of a country, or two countries, contesting the World Cup in Brazil. There are 27 questions relating to the 32 countries. You can try to work out the answers using your existing knowledge and deductive logic and then when you get stuck do a bit of research to find the rest.

The answers to the questions, along with brief explanations as necessary, will be posted on the site upon the conclusion of the group stages, on Friday 27^th June. Please feel free to contact me if you have any queries.

We sincerely hope you find the quiz stimulating and enjoyable. Who knows, I might finally get a book proposal that combines the world’s greatest pastime and…football.