Skip to main content

Sports lawyers circle like vultures

The Financial Times sports team reports: ‘Our inbox has been bombarded with notes from law firms, who think the EFL has opened the floodgates to further litigation. Southampton players may look to sue the club for depriving them of potential promotion bonuses. Clubs that finished just outside the play-offs or who were relegated after losing to Southampton could also claim their league position was affected by cheating. Even Hull might well argue they should be promoted by default.’

The bizarre case also raises some more philosophical issues. It comes a few weeks after the Confederation of African Football decided to award the African Cup of Nations to Morocco, despite the team losing the final in extra time to Senegal. CAF judged that Senegal had forfeited the match by leaving the field of play for about 15 minutes in protest at a refereeing decision.

In other sports, changing the outcome of a competition after the fact is not unheard of. Doping cases have led to several Olympic champions being stripped of medals later on. At the Paris Olympics in 2024, there was even a medal ceremony for athletes who had “won” medals in the months and years following previous editions of the games.

In football, the tradition has typically been that past wrongs lead to future-facing sanctions. Transfer embargoes, docked points, fines, even relegation.

But as the law creeps ever more into football, could we be in a new era where past results are still open to revision? Crystal Palace won a place in the Europa League last year by winning the FA Cup, but had their spot stripped by Uefa due to rules on multi-club ownership. Similarly, Club León were booted out of the Club World Cup by Fifa before the tournament kicked off.

Football authorities seem to be taking a harder a line on the rules, and appear more willing to nullify sporting outcomes if they believe lines have been crossed. The advent of video-assisted refereeing has made it harder to celebrate goals in the moment. Could league titles and cup wins be next? 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

It's no deal say Spurs insiders over Taiwanese takeover

Senior figures at Tottenham Hotspur insisted on Friday that they had not been informed of any deal to sell Daniel Levy’s stake in the club. A business group, Eight Sports Capital — which is said to include a billionaire Taiwanese financier — claimed that it had an agreement in place to buy a 24.99 per cent stake in ENIC, the club’s majority owners, from Levy, who owns 29.88 per cent. The Times has been told Ng Wing Fai and Brooklyn Earick form part of the group, having both been linked previously to potential takeovers of the Premier League club. The Taiwanese businessman, Richard Tsai, is also said to be part of the consortium. He is reportedly worth £7 billion.  Last year Earick, the former DJ and tech entrepreneur, was part of an attempted £4.5 billion takeover, which was “unequivocally rejected” by Spurs.  An ENIC spokesperson said: “We can confirm that neither ENIC nor THFC are aware of any sale by Daniel Levy’s Family Trust of its minority stake in ENIC, THFC’...
Post a Comment
Read more

Spurs CEO attacks luxury training base

The Tottenham Hotspur chief executive Vinai Venkatesham has issued a withering assessment of the way the club was run under Daniel Levy, likening the state-of-the-art training centre to a five-star hotel rather than a centre of high performance.  Venkatesham was appointed to his role in April 2025, having stepped down as chief executive at Arsenal the previous summer. However, he has said that some aspects of the club were “in a significantly worse state” than he expected.  “Our training centre is amazing, one of the best, if not the best in the world,” Venkatesham told BBC Sport. “But when you look around, it looks more like a five-star hotel than it does a performance environment. That will change over the summer. I think there are many areas where the club hasn’t got the right level of expertise.”  He explained that the football side of operations was the club’s main downfall when he arrived last year. [One Spurs fan wryly observed that it was like a water company sayi...
Post a Comment
Read more

Fulham requires big funding from owner

After lengthy delays, Fulham’s shiny, new Riverside Stand has finally opened, creating “a unique Thameside destination with first class facilities for supporters and partners on match days, as well as for the wider community year-round”. This ambitious project has increased Craven Cottage’s capacity by around 4,000 to 29,600, while it has also taken advantage of the club’s fantastic location and wealthy catchment area by including two Michelin star restaurants, a rooftop swimming pool, corporate hospitality and event space, all benefiting from views of the Thames. Chief executive Alistair Mackintosh observed, “Fulham is the sort of club that can have a business class or first class and have fans that turn left on a plane.” Indeed, there is also an exclusive members club – with a football season ticket as an optional extra. It’s fair to say that “the times they are a-changing”, as this is a long way from the traditional pie and a pint. However, in a world where clubs face the tw...
Post a Comment
Read more