Abstract: The establishment of the Chinese Court of Arbitration for Sport (CCAS) marks China’s transition toward institutionalized sports dispute resolution, yet its early operation continues to face an “authority deficit” associated with administrative embeddedness. Drawing on the historical development of the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), this paper argues that arbitral authority is generated through structural independence and sustained adjudicative practice rather than formal institutional design alone. Using a coded sample of 262 CAS awards rendered between 1980 and 2026, the study constructs a Procedural Justice Index (PJI) and a Legitimacy and Authority Index (LAI) to examine the relationship between procedural justice and authority construction. The findings reveal a statistically significant but non-linear positive correlation (r ≈ 0.549, p < 0.001): stable arbitral authority depends less on increasingly “thick” procedures than on consistent rule articulation, precedent continuity, and the structured delineation of institutional boundaries. The paper concludes that CCAS may gradually develop from a dispute-resolution mechanism into a rule-generating institution within China’s sports governance system by strengthening organizational independence, enhancing procedural transparency, and stabilizing adjudicative practice.