About

Jérôme Perlemuter joined the Ligue de Football Professionnel (LFP) 11 years ago, and ‘always compares life at the French league to the TV show 24, every day is a new day full of challenges’. After moving in-house to join the LFP, Perlemuter quickly adjusted to the complexities of media rights, dealing with sensitive and strategic aspects on behalf of the league, a factor that ‘football mostly lives on’. Perlemuter also takes part in the association of football leagues around Europe known as the European Professional Football Leagues (EPFL), where a collective effort is made to direct ‘the voice of the leagues to the European and political institutions’. This aspect goes hand-in-hand with his lobbying at a national level: ‘The rationale of lobbying is “when you are not happy with a law, you need to change it”. My view is that this is the big difference from working in a firm to being a GC. At a firm, you take the law as it is and try to use it to the best you can. When you are with a company and you are not happy with the law you have the option to try to change it for the better’. One of his major collective lobbying achievements with other stakeholders would be the change in the French law on betting, an achievement that sports organisations abroad are now looking to implement. Perlemuter is a master at using the law to move the commercial dealings of the LFP forward and acknowledges that ‘law is about being creative’. Perlemuter’s breadth of knowledge and understanding of his industry led to him being elected as a practicing judge before the Paris Commercial Court in 2014, whereby judges are elected from within the in-house business industry.