As legal director of LaLiga, the first tier of professional association football in Spain, María José López Lorenzo holds a high-profile role given the global appeal of Spanish football and the rapid international growth of the league’s brand in recent years. She began working in LaLiga’s legal department in 2013 but was appointed to her current position two years later.

López is commended for contributing to the evolution of the professional football league with the commercialisation of its audio-visual rights in a collective manner for the first time in its history, as well as her provision of expert legal support for the competition’s internationalisation, creating affiliates and projects that contribute to the aforementioned commercialisation of audio-visual rights.

She is also distinguished for developing and implementing legal strategies that protect the IP rights and audio-visual content of the competition. She says these projects made her ‘realise the importance of inter-departmental coordination in order to achieve goals and objectives and resolve problems’, adding, ‘they also illustrate the necessity of adaptation in an ever changing and challenging environment such as LaLiga’.

Other important matters she’s contributed to include a litigation regarding the scope and reach of LaLiga competencies, dealing with anti-piracy legal measures and facilitating strategic sponsorship agreements on a global scale. In terms of how she has improved her legal department, she set up specialised areas focused on ‘the constantly changing and new requirements of LaLiga’ over a very short period of time and says these new areas give ‘a greater specialised legal attention that directly contribute to the strategic development of LaLiga and its affiliates on both a national and international level’. Reflecting on the eventful time she has had so far at LaLiga, López had the following to say: ‘Working for LaLiga for the last four years has been an incredibly challenging and rewarding experience because of the unexpected and fast growth of LaLiga.

This is a very interesting sector from a legal perspective due to the evolution of audio-visual content in the digital era and the way digital content is consumed. The rapidly changing nature of digital content and how users interact with said content obliges us to look for and provide new legal solutions to the challenges we face on a daily basis’.