Palace get ready for court

Common sense would suggest that confirmation of John Textor’s exit from Crystal Palace should resolve the issues around the Premier League club’s connection to French side Lyon. After all, the American investor has now both sold his Palace stake and left all positions of authority at Lyon.

Palace are taking their case to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), asking the so-called “supreme court” of worldwide athletic endeavour to overturn UEFA’s decision.

Palace have also named Nottingham Forest and Lyon in their appeal, as their fellow Premier League side have been elevated from the Conference League to the second-tier Europa League at their expense, while their disputed stablemates from Ligue 1 have been left in the Europa League, as their higher domestic league finish of the two sides trumps winning the FA Cup. 

Steve Parish, Palace’s chairman, will not mind which of those clubs CAS demotes, as long as what he views as the “terrible injustice” of his team being removed from the Europa League is reversed. He believes he must take this fight on for Palace’s players, staff and fans, as well as others who might find themselves in this position one day. And he clearly thinks this would not happen to a bigger, established side, so there is an “us versus them” element to his crusade. 

What is CAS?

It was then International Olympic Committee (IOC) president Juan Antonio Samaranch who first realised global sport needed an in-house method for washing dirty linen, as the regular courts are expensive, potentially embarrassing and painfully slow. With the IOC willing to pay for it all, housing it in Lausanne, the Olympic Movement’s Swiss home, made sense.

The system worked pretty well until 1992, when the International Equestrian Federation found a German rider named Elmar Gundel guilty of doping his horse and banned him. When CAS rejected his appeal, Gundel took his fight to Switzerland’s Federal Supreme Court. He did not get much joy there either, but the court did agree that the link between CAS and the IOC was too cosy.

The result was the 1994 creation of the International Council of Arbitration for Sport (ICAS), an arms-length body that would run and finance CAS for all Olympic and Paralympic sports. When the World Anti-Doping Agency was created in 1999, CAS was also formally established as the last stop for doping cases.

In 2024, more than 900 cases were submitted to CAS, with about 300 progressing to full-blown hearings. It now has 45 permanent staff, plus around 400 experts serving as visiting arbitrators, who are housed in a purpose-built office in Lausanne’s poshest convention centre. 

Hearings are private, with costs kept low. Verdicts typically come within six to 12 months but expedited hearings are held for matters in need of quick answers, such as doping cases during an ongoing Olympics and over Palace’s predicament. The draw for the final round of Conference League qualifying is a week today (August 4), with those two-legged ties then scheduled for August 21 and 28. Palace, Forest and Lyon need to know ASAP which competition they’re in. 

In terms of results, sports federations still tend to win the day, as Gundel discovered, but Manchester City famously beat UEFA at CAS in 2020, while Paul Pogba’s doping ban was reduced from four years to 18 months last year, saving his career.

The Palace case

Textor’s voting rights will be a key consideration for CAS, but so will his financial contributions and influence on recruitment and commercial strategy.

Palace may try to argue that a “more flexible and purposeful interpretation of the regulations” should be applied, with the club’s lawyers asking the panel to think about what UEFA is trying to achieve with its MCO rules, fair competition, and whether the English side pose any threat to that legitimate aim.

While each case is considered on its own merits, precedents can be helpful, and two CAS panels have recently made very quick decisions on MCO cases involving Slovakian team FC DAC 1904 and Drogheda United from the Republic of Ireland.

Both were blocked from playing in the Conference League by the CFCB and then lost their appeals, DAC unanimously and Drogheda on a majority verdict. The two cases were different but both argued they simply did not have enough time to create the separation UEFA requires between them and their MCO sister clubs.

And while Palace will come armed with evidence that shows Textor was routinely ignored, UEFA’s lawyers will no doubt point to the letter CFCB chair Sunil Gulati sent to the club licensing managers at UEFA’s 55 member associations last May which spells out what “decisive influence” means.

A literal reading of that document — the 30 per cent shareholding threshold, significant financial support, being a director, the ability to influence recruitment decisions and so on — would suggest Palace’s legal team are going to have their work cut out.

Given all that, it might make sense for Palace to make a more general argument that a strict application of the rules in this case simply make no sense, as there is obviously no threat to the integrity of the competition, which is the entire point of article 5.01 in UEFA’s rulebook, the regulation that deals with MCO clubs.

And there is some encouragement here, in that the concepts of fairness, integrity and sporting justice are all enshrined in Swiss law. 

The Forest dimension

Another possible line of attack for Palace is the apparent inconsistencies in the application of UEFA’s rules — and this is where the decision to make Forest a party in this appeal is intriguing. 

The argument, presumably, would be that Evangelos Marinakis, owner of both Forest and Greece’s Olympiacos, did not place the former in a blind trust until the end of April, a move he reversed when they eventually failed to join their cousins from Athens in next season’s Champions League. It is a moot point now but Marinakis seemed to miss the UEFA deadline, too, and, if literal readings are important, you either meet it or you don’t. 

If Palace wanted to be really mischievous, they could ask what Marinakis was doing on the pitch at the end of Forest’s home draw against Leicester City on May 11. While he may well have been checking on the health of an injured Forest player, the episode suggested the Greek billionaire still exerted some influence at the City Ground despite that blind-trust move.

But an argument that effectively depends on the panel accepting that it is OK for a club to be confused about the regulations is unlikely to pan out.

Palace won the FA Cup fair and square against their odds and they deserve their Europa League prize.  Unfortunately, I think they are unlikely to win.   They are not Manchester City.