Abstract This article examines player transfer restrictions in Nippon Professional Baseball from the perspectives of competition law and labour law. For decades, rules established by professional baseball clubs and their central governing organisation have severely limited player mobility, despite its recognition as a fundamental labour right. These restrictions, embedded in the Baseball Agreement and the Standard Player Contract, operate as coordinated practices that suppress competition between clubs. While such conduct ordinarily falls within the scope of Japanese Antimonopoly Act, the Japan Fair Trade Commission (JFTC) has historically declined to intervene in professional sports, treating transfer restrictions and related rules primarily as labour relations issues and leaving them largely unregulated for decades. A turning point came with the 2018 report published by the Competition Policy Research Centre of JFTC. This development reopened the possibility of antimonopoly scrutiny in a field that had long been insulated from competition law. In contrast, the United States has developed extensive case law under the “non-statutory labour exemption” clarifying the boundary between labour law-based restraints and antitrust prohibitions. By comparing Japanese and American approaches, this article identifies the absence of a clear balancing mechanism in Japan—similar to the U.S. exemption doctrine—and evaluates the implications of the 2018 policy change for future regulatory certainty. It also considers prospects for reform aimed at reconciling contractual freedom with the principles of fair competition in professional sports.
Kusunoki et al. (Wed,) studied this question.