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.
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