Massimo Coccia

Massimo Coccia is founding partner of Coccia De Angelis & Associati law firm. He holds a J.D. degree cum laude from the Law School of the University of Rome Sapienza (1981) and a Master of Laws degree (LL.M.) from the University of Michigan Law School (1984), which he attended with a Fulbright fellowship.

It is universally recognized that Mr. Coccia has an extensive experience of, and is an authority in, sports law and in commercial arbitration at international and national level, both as an arbitrator and as a counsel, as attested by Who’s Who Legal (https://whoswholegal.com/massimo-coccia); indeed, along the years he has been involved in almost 400 arbitration proceedings, most of them at international level. He also has been frequently involved in regulatory matters such as antitrust and energy, as well as in entertainment law issues. Within sports law he is frequently retained as legal advisor or counsel by international and national federations, leagues, clubs, teams, agents and athletes of various sports. Within football, in particular, Mr. Coccia held the no. 2 position within the Italian Football Federation (FIGC) in 2006-2007, when he was appointed as Interim Vice-Commissioner in the wake of a match-fixing scandal and authored important reforms of the rules and governance of FIGC. Since 1995, Massimo Coccia has been an arbitrator at the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), where he is regarded as one of the most experienced arbitrators, having sat in about 300 cases and drafted many prominent awards, having also been a CAS arbitrator at the Olympic Games of Salt Lake City 2002, Turin 2006 and London 2012.

Massimo Coccia is also a tenured law professor, teaching International Law at the Tuscia University of Viterbo as well as European Competition Law at the University of Rome Sapienza. Massimo also frequently teaches in graduate courses and seminars on international and national sports law. He has published extensively on issues of sports law, international arbitration, international trade law and EU law, and is often invited to speak at symposia on those subjects.

Mr. Coccia’s mother tongue is Italian and he also is fluent in English, French and Spanish.