City launch legal action against the Premier League | Club & PL reach settlement | Proceedings dropped (p1147)

BringBackSwales said:
This is all beyond me! I am a football fan, and I understand a bit about that (or I like to think so anyway), but can anyone explain what yesterday’s announcements actually means?
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The 2011-2024 APT rules we said were unlawful, have been proven to be. But they are past rules anyway, there are new ones in place which City said needed to be held-off being implemented until they were deemed lawful but the PL and its clubs went ahead with them anyway.
 
tonea2003 said:
fantastic post mate, its where i've been all along, this protectionist racket by the scum,scousers and the self entitled tarquins is slowly being unravelled.
its like fred's corner shop not being allowed to develop the biggest and the best supermarket chain because tesco,morrisons and asda don't like it and want to keep their share
that is exactly what has been going on here
you get told football is different, no it is not
i think and i hope that is where khaldoon and the boys are going with this
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Exactly!

Where City went wrong, was us being too gentlemanly over this fuckin farce, when we should've donned the knuckle-dusters & steeltoe-capped bovver boots & started kicking heads in years ago.

We didn't want to be seen as the ones demolishing the old football world order, but the legacy clubs have been trying to exterminate us out of existence anyway, so looking back we'd have had nothing to lose by burning this corrupt shit down after their first attempts at coming for us!

I couldn't have put forward a more easy to explain analogy than you have, so all the lay people can understand our situation & not have to zone out when all the legal eagles step in getting all technical.

This is why I can see straight through Stefan. Why isn't he making simple, City's situation just like you have? Nah, to do so would be to render him useless to the media, which would hit his professional profile which now reads:

"Represented Manchester City Football Club (years ago). TV & Radio personality who regularly makes "expert" legal contributions on Talkshite & Sly Sports".

Having that on Stefan's CV must be like winning the lottery for him! This is exactly why he tries to suck the hope out of City fans, & daren't hold the media's feet to the fire in defence of City. Why? They'd never ask him back, that's why!

Stefan's also admitted he like everyone outside the process isn't in receipt of the full facts. So the question is, why is he seemingly calling into question the statements made by City's lawyers?

Stefan & others are literally enabling those wanting to see the permanent demise of Manchester City. They should be putting forward analogies like yours, plus keep hammering home the point that we're STILL waiting for the police, HMRC, SFO & Companies House to raid the Etihad as they investigate all the heinous crimes City are alleged to have committed. Where the fuck are they?

Who in the media is asking these most fundamental of questions?

Certainly not those claiming to be City fans.
 
Saddleworth2 said:
That seems a fair and balanced summary based on what we know. My own view is that Steffan misjudged the strength of feeling that this win would be welcomed by fans - we should enjoy it after all that has been said about our club.
I think you are agreeing with him that the practical implications may not be that great, albeit in its own statement the club used the phrase 'Seismic on many levels' which suggests they feel differently.
I think we should all just enjoy this win while we can, and lets hope the celebrations can continue around 4.55pm this afternoon.
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I haven't seen all the posts by @slbsn and the ones I have looked at deal with the repercussions. There's nothing I disagree at all in what he's said about those. I did see the word "seismic" somewhere and didn't know it comes from the club's own comments, but I suspect they might be best read in the context of the bad blood between City and the PL, with the club wanting to take the opportunity to gloat a bit. :)

As a City fan, I'm quite enjoying the fact City have given the PL a bloody nose in APT1. However, if anyone wants to take a more pragmatic view on the grounds that the consequences may not eventually be that great, it's a perfectly legitimate view. (That's not commenting on Stefan specifically - as I say, I haven 't seen all his comments and the search function currently isn't working.) I'd love @tolmie's hairdoo to be correct, though, as to be fair he often is.
 
petrusha said:
There have been nearly 800 posts in the 18 hours since I was last on this thread and I've barely scratched the surface of those. Nor have I read anything about the judgment other than a couple of reports. If this lack of detailed knowledge of the case means I'm mistaken in the analysis below, then apologies and I'm happy to be corrected. Anyway, for what they're worth, this post contains my impressions so far.

Clearly, this is a win for City and not merely a negligible one. We set out to have the PL's APT rules declared void and they were, so there's no other way to view it. There's certainly satisfaction to be taken from that, whatever else happens subsequently. I therefore won't criticise City fans who want to enjoy the moment given the clear hostility with which the PL regards our club and I'm pleased, too.

That said, the practical effect as we move forward may not end up being all that significant for a couple of reasons:
  1. It's only the old set of rules that has been struck down by this ruling and there's now a new set that the PL claims is valid because the offending provisions from the previous rules have been removed, so City have to go through the whole process again to have the new rules invalidated and it's hard at the moment to judge from outside what the prospects are in that case.
  2. In terms of City claiming compensation for the PL rejecting proposed sponsorship deals of the club under the old rules, any claim needs to show that the loss claimed results directly from the PL's actions, and that may not be easy to do for more nebulous claims, while, as we're basically talking about the Etihad deal here and that arrangement is evidently still in effect, it's not exactly clear from outside what the loss actually is.
I don't see any of the above as particularly contentious or controversial. However, given that I'm commenting on an arbitral award I haven't read, I'm open to being persuaded otherwise.

From my perspective, the major point to take away relates to the PL. In my view, in the real world, there'd be hall to pay in the relevant industry if a quasi-regulatory body tried to enact a set of rules that were subsequently declared void in their entirety and the organisation were shown, in the proceedings leading to that outcome, not to be impartial as regards leading players in the industry when formulating and applying its rules. Extensive changes in its leadership would be an absolute certainty.

In my view, Masters's position thus ought to be untenable, but I thought that was the case as soon as the initial decision became public. Nonetheless, the usual slow-witted dullards in the media were happy to perform their accustomed client journalist role by spinning, after the initial determination, the claim, highly dubious even then, that the PL had been the victors in the case.

If he survives now, I assume it's so he can be the fall-guy should the so-called '115' case produce an outcome that influential PL member clubs regard as unpalatable. I regard his eventual demise as a certainty and will celebrate it whenever it comes.
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You nail it as usual, Petrusha. I would imagine that if/when we (substantially) win the 115 case then there will be an exodus of PL execs, regardless of an appeal.
 
halfcenturyup said:
Good post. But I think what people are having a problem with is how you can make three or four changes to rules that don't exist?

Seems to me as a hopeless non-lawyer that they will have to approve a whole new set of APT rules that, taken together, form a lawful coherent whole.

They may very well look like the November rules, but just making changes wasn't good enough?

Then you have the question about the lawfulness of the transition measures on shareholder loans and, for that matter, the lawfulness of all the financial rules including FFP and PSR, taking this judgment into account ..... It's a complete pig's breakfast that will take forever to sort out.
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For me the way to sort out the pig’s breakfast is simply to have no rules at all about the source of funds. Spending can be easily regulated, so the source of funds is completely irrelevant. Is the anchoring proposal just this? If it is, fine, except that in their usual incompetent way, the PL have chosen a bonkers item to act as the anchor, ie the tv revenue of the club with the least.
 
Psychedelic Casual said:
The 2011-2024 APT rules we said were unlawful, have been proven to be. But they are past rules anyway, there are new ones in place which City said needed to be held-off being implemented until they were deemed lawful but the PL and its clubs went ahead with them anyway.
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They're no doubt already lining up another bunch of slightly tweaked rules to be implemented just before any judgement on the current rules, so they can say "That's the previous rules. The new ones are legal." ad infinitum.
 
I haven’t read the briefs, the press releases or anything beyond the headlines.
Things are more dramatic and fun that way.

If people want to be nerds and read, then all power to them!
Personally? I’ll read a sentence then wildly imagine the rest. That’s why I KNOW that city have won and masters is currently sat in a pile of his own piss not answering the many phone calls he’s getting from the cartel puppet masters.
 
Prestwich_Blue said:
What does that bolded sentence mean? It's not a debt, that a bank or other financial institution sells to a third party if they don't think they can collect it. What evidence do you have that we've done anything to mitigate any loss or even that we need to in this situation?

I'm well aware of the legal issues around mitigation of loss. I spent two years studying Commercial Law as part of my degree. I'm well aware that (a) there has to be a tangible loss (b) you have to show that there was a directly attributable cause of that loss and (c) you did your best to mitigate that loss or not make it worse.

So if these contracts were due to come into force in July this year, there has, as yet, been no effective loss. I'm fine with that.

But let's assume those two disputed sponsorship agreements were planned to start in July 2024, and that the Etihad one was for £90m and the FAB one for £10m per annum. Let's assume also that the PL said that Etihad couldn't be more than £60m and FAB £5m. We therefore had to renegotiate those contracts to those amounts.

This financial year alone we've "lost" a potential £35m that we could have received under those contracts, had we not been forced to amend them, under rules that have now been declared unlawful. I take that to mean that the conditions imposed are now unenforceable, and that the original proposed amounts should stand. In that case, we could collect the "lost" £35m under the original contracts and there's no loss.

But in the unlikely event that Etihad & FAB were to say "Sorry, we have a contract, that's what you told us to pay and we're not renegotiating" or the APT rules were lawful, then we've effectively suffered a potential loss.

Having spent a number of years working for an insurance company, I know that if you claimed for damage caused by a water leak, and you'd let that leak carry on for a while without making an attempt to fix it, wand your failure made the damage far worse and the cost to fix it much higher than it would have been to just fix the original leak, you would be rightly accused of failing to mitigate your loss, and any payout reduced.

This is around contract law though, and there has been no breach of contract that I can see. In my example there has been offer & acceptance. Etihad has contracted to pay us £90m and we've accepted. Neither party has breached that contract; the problem has come by a third-party who isn't a party to the contract imposing an arbitrary value on it, under rules that were subsequently declared unlawful.

I struggle to see how it's our duty to mitigate that, in this particular scenario, by going out and trying to find an additional £35m.
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Prestwich_Blue said:
What does that bolded sentence mean? It's not a debt, that a bank or other financial institution sells to a third party if they don't think they can collect it. What evidence do you have that we've done anything to mitigate any loss or even that we need to in this situation?

I'm well aware of the legal issues around mitigation of loss. I spent two years studying Commercial Law as part of my degree. I'm well aware that (a) there has to be a tangible loss (b) you have to show that there was a directly attributable cause of that loss and (c) you did your best to mitigate that loss or not make it worse.

So if these contracts were due to come into force in July this year, there has, as yet, been no effective loss. I'm fine with that.

But let's assume those two disputed sponsorship agreements were planned to start in July 2024, and that the Etihad one was for £90m and the FAB one for £10m per annum. Let's assume also that the PL said that Etihad couldn't be more than £60m and FAB £5m. We therefore had to renegotiate those contracts to those amounts.

This financial year alone we've "lost" a potential £35m that we could have received under those contracts, had we not been forced to amend them, under rules that have now been declared unlawful. I take that to mean that the conditions imposed are now unenforceable, and that the original proposed amounts should stand. In that case, we could collect the "lost" £35m under the original contracts and there's no loss.

But in the unlikely event that Etihad & FAB were to say "Sorry, we have a contract, that's what you told us to pay and we're not renegotiating" or the APT rules were lawful, then we've effectively suffered a potential loss.

Having spent a number of years working for an insurance company, I know that if you claimed for damage caused by a water leak, and you'd let that leak carry on for a while without making an attempt to fix it, wand your failure made the damage far worse and the cost to fix it much higher than it would have been to just fix the original leak, you would be rightly accused of failing to mitigate your loss, and any payout reduced.

This is around contract law though, and there has been no breach of contract that I can see. In my example there has been offer & acceptance. Etihad has contracted to pay us £90m and we've accepted. Neither party has breached that contract; the problem has come by a third-party who isn't a party to the contract imposing an arbitrary value on it, under rules that were subsequently declared unlawful.

I struggle to see how it's our duty to mitigate that, in this particular scenario, by going out and trying to find an additional £35m.
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You and he are arguing over minor points of legalise.
From my knowledge of the club it is always the bigger picture that is most important.
The club did not do this for 10 or 20 million, it was to alter the landscape, probably to bring down Masters, and to finally get a place at the top Table.

You are both intelligent and have so much knowledge, experience and expertise to waste it on insignificance.
 
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