The European Union’s engagement with sport has been driven almost entirely by its concern to protect and promote its internal market. Sport went unmentioned in the EU’s foundational Treaties until as late as 2009, and even the relevant amendments which have been effective since that year created only a narrowly drawn competence for the EU to act in the field. It is the EU’s application of the core principles of its internal market, most of all its rules on the free movement of economic actors across borders, on control of anti-competitive practices, and forbidding discrimination based on nationality, with which sport has long had to reckon. And it is that preoccupation with the internal market which has long been regarded with suspicion by governing bodies in sport. The EU, it is alleged, is tied to pursuit of an economic model which is blind to the socio-economic and cultural peculiarities of sport. EU sports law, it is complained, is a sports law which is shaped on the EU’s terms, not those of sport. In this paper I reflect on but reject this criticism. It is certainly true that the bulk of EU sports law is driven by the grand project of converting the territory of the 27 Member States into a single economic space – the EU’s internal market. However I show that the EU’s institutions, most prominently the European Commission and the Court of Justice, have been assiduous in ensuring that the interpretation and application of the rules of the internal market is sensitive to the particular features of organised sport which distinguish it from normal economic activity. The institutions of the EU do not go so far as to accept uncritically every claim advanced by governing bodies in sport for recognition of special status but they are carefully receptive to sincere claims, and they never simply dismiss sport as no different from manufacturing goods or selling services. I depict the lifecycle of EU law’s interaction with sport as a process whereby the EU’s institutions have adapted the Treaty rules of economic law to acknowledge sport’s special features while, for their part, sporting bodies, typically more slowly and grudgingly, have come to accept that their regulatory model has spillover economic effects which mean that simply dismissing engagement with EU law is both legally unfeasible and politically unwise. The reforms of 2009 are emblematic of a more carefully calibrated relationship and, moreover, the strategic value of relying on EU law has lately become visible in the struggle for power in sport, most recently in UEFA's brief collision with the European SuperLeague. I wconclude by suggesting that the EU’s engagement with sport could usefully be elevated beyond its current ad hoc approach to a more proactive ambition.