Klubi Futbollit Llapi 1932 v. Valmir Berisha & FIFA

A Kosovan club raised a jurisdictional challenge before even reaching the substance of its dispute with a player: it argued FIFA's DRC had no business hearing the case at all, because Kosovo maintains its own national dispute resolution chamber (NDRC), which FIFA's rules generally require disputes to go through first when one exists and meets minimum standards. There was a second, related wrinkle — the player had grown up in Sweden despite Kosovan heritage, raising the question of which country's football system he should be treated as belonging to for jurisdiction purposes, sometimes called "sporting nationality."

The panel worked through both jurisdictional questions before touching the merits. On the NDRC point, it held FIFA's DRC did have jurisdiction, because the dispute had a genuine international dimension and, crucially, the club had not actually demonstrated that Kosovo's NDRC met FIFA's own minimum procedural requirements — the burden was on the party asserting the NDRC's authority to prove it qualified. On sporting nationality, the panel treated the player as Swedish for these purposes, given where he was actually raised and developed as a player.

The FIFA DRC had ruled on the underlying dispute on 30 January 2025, partially accepting the player's claim, before the club's appeal to CAS. Decided 10 December 2025, and only having cleared both jurisdictional hurdles, the panel reached the substance: the club had failed to pay a signing fee equal to more than two months' salary, the player gave the club a 15-day deadline in a default notice to fix it, and the club did not comply within that window — enough to establish just cause for the player to leave under Articles 14 and 14bis of the FIFA Regulations on the Status and Transfer of Players. The appeal was partially upheld only insofar as the compensation figure was adjusted downward to reflect mitigation from the player's subsequent earnings; the jurisdictional and just-cause findings against the club stood in full.