The release of the audio exchanges between officials at Saturday's game between Spurs and Liverpool has fanned the flames of the controversy about the offside decision. They reveal an unacceptable level of incompetence and casual decision-making.
Dan Chapman, partner and head of sport and employment at
Leathes Prior, said it was difficult to see what legal claims Liverpool had. He told The Athletic: “What
Liverpool are probably going to do, perhaps with the support of most clubs, is
say, ‘This is no longer acceptable’ and, ‘There needs to be radical changes’. I
can’t realistically see there is a legal route. But you don’t need a strong
case sometimes, you need an arguable case and then you use it to bring about
change.
“I can’t see any circumstances where it’s going to result in
any changes being made to the fixture because you can’t demonstrate that the
game would have been different had that goal counted.”
Hannah Kent, a senior associate in the dispute resolution
team at Onside Law, agreed any legal challenge is unlikely to succeed.
She said: “On-field decisions don’t tend to be interfered
with after the event. There are very limited exceptions — if there’s been
evidence of corruption, for example.
“Their course of action would be to get the official
sanctioned or taken off their matches. If Liverpool tried to get the match
replayed, which is extremely unlikely and they haven’t called for this, then all
sorts of other clubs would try to do the same thing.”
Dev Kumar Parmar, a sports lawyer and principal director at
Parmars, suggested Liverpool’s statements were part of a communications
strategy designed to “keep the rhetoric going and show they are not taking it
lying down”.
Stephen Taylor Heath, co-head of sports law at JWM Solicitors,
concurred that Liverpool would find it hard to bring a legal case when it could
not definitely be proved that allowing the goal to stand would have changed the
result.
By way of comparison, he cited the example of Sheffield
United in 2008 when a Football Association arbitration panel ruled the
club had been relegated from the Premier League because West Ham
United broke the rules when they signed Carlos Tevez.
Liverpool do not want a replay. What they do want a transparent investigation into the
procedural failings so lessons are learned going forward. Their immediate
priorities are to establish what form the review will take, who will oversee it
and what role the Premier League will play in it. The audio should
provide a clearer understanding into how and why Diaz’s goal was disallowed.
They want to know why the decision was taken so quickly and
why there was no intervention when the mix-up quickly became apparent.
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