Pretty much yes. But image rights are deemed to be personal to players and separate to their wages/bonuses. HMRC have a general rule hat about 10% of their total remuneration to be paid in this way, to their own personal companies rather than on a PAYE basis.
As an example, let's say someone is a photographer and an employee of a company that does commercial & wedding photography. He buys the right to do all the wedding photography and pays his employer a sum of money for that right. The money he earns in that way still goes to his employer initially, but they pay it to him gross, which he than has to account for and pay any tax on. Whereas his wages for the employer's main commercial photography business is paid to him as normal salary, with tax & NI deducted at source.
City also moved a number of employees into two subsidiary companies (City Football Services and City Football Marketing). They were paid through these companies but they were loss-making, needing constant injections of cash. That was seen by some as an attempt to move costs off the books but those businesses cross-charged the various CFG clubs for their services, on a pro-rata basis. Obviously most of the charge fell to City but it went through our books, as Other Operating Expenses though, instead of Wages. Also UEFA included those companies in wht it called the 'Reporting Perimeter'. That meant we had to include their results in our FFP submission, with any double-charging cancelled out.
