My American autocorrect says judgement so the IT overlords have ruled I'm afraid.
Mate, we've read the same things from these journalists about CAS and the like for years now, we know exactly how educated they are on these matters. I don't care if the lad is someone who chauffeured around a sports lawyer's second cousin, he'd still be vastly more qualified than these hacks based on osmosis alone. These are the people solely responsible for the "City got off on a technicality" narrative.
I'm getting away from the point here. The point that I was making is that I don't listen to sports journalists because they have no idea what they're talking about on legal issues. Not even a bit of a clue. And you can times that by a thousand in terms of what they write several hours after a 175 page technical document has come out and how that knocks on for everyone else. The only people worth listening to about legal issues are the legal community and those legally trained. You have you view and I appreciate that but from what I've read, it appears at odds with the general consensus of the legal industry who have expressed opinions. I tend to go with the general consensus in expert domains without compelling arguments. Almost all opinions fall on the "we'll see" side of the spectrum and I don't see any outside of the aforementioned sports journalists who are touting this as a large City win.
The one exception to this of course is Simon Cliff. But Simon Cliff is currently working under a legal strategy for one of the sides of the argument so not what I'd call exactly a fair source. Facts are facts and in the legal arena, facts are useless things to have. Everybody is trying to sell their interpretation of the facts that benefit them the most, and this is what I think Cliff is doing so I'll eye his proclamations with more scrutiny than professionals who are not involved in the case.
I just don't see this large City win. I'm not even sure I see this as anything but a minor event that will have little to no bearing on anything going forward. On the face of it, and this is just my opinion with all the caveats I've put above, the idea that the entire APT ruleset now needs redrafting or is currently null due to this judgment seems far fetched. It seems much more likely based on the wording that I've tried to understand that the blue pencil test will apply; they can modify these without having to completely rewrite the entire ruleset so the rules stand as is. I'd love for someone qualified enough to explain why that isn't the case and show me what I'm missing.
I'd even go one step further and argue that maybe all of the people I've quoted including yourself, the Professor and Stefan have jumped the gun a bit and we won't really know the impacts of this for a decent while yet because there's going to be meetings and redrafts and possibly tribunals and more legal action from us or other clubs and only when we've got some distance from it can we really see who "won" or "lost".
Even with all that, I'm not even sure what winning even means in this case. We own shares in the Premier League. We're a shareholder suing the board, why others want the company to fail based on that I can't really work out.
I agree with much of what you’ve posted here, and certainly (and I’ve previously posted in these terms) it’s difficult to know how successful City have been in terms of this action
per se, without knowing what the objectives were.
However, from a strategic point of view I disagree about the implications of this, at least as things presently appear. If our long term strategic aim is to (further) discredit the regulatory body that oversee the club, because they have been acting against it in bad faith, then I would say there are many reasons to believe this has succeeded. Following from the Leicester debacle, it underlines the fact that this is an organisation that isn’t fit for purpose because it is grossly incompetent and/or acting in ways that are improper.
I disagree with the analysis of others because in my view (fwiw) you cannot dress up a finding of unlawfulness in relation to an organisation’s own rules in any way other than hugely significant. They have, once again, wholly misconceived rules which they have constructed and have custody of, which they impose upon other organisations; rules that have been found to be unlawful in ways that are significant. These rules are not some abstract small print, they are front and centre to the way the league is governed. I’m struggling to see how anyone can not see the significance of this, especially placed alongside the misinterpretation of Leicester’s status with those same rules.
I take on board what you say about counselling against a scorched earth policy (in the club’s best interests) but that has to be weighed against the many inferences of the conduct of the PL towards the club. I feel the club is well placed to evaluate this and act accordingly. The unusual existence and robust tone of Cliff’s letter suggests they have done this. They may have done so reluctantly, but out of a sense of necessity.
I have always been confident throughout the last eighteen months that the club’s judgement (correct spelling in this instance!) should be trusted. Moreover, the club wouldn’t have embarked in this course of action, nor sent the letter out, if it felt the associated gains would be nugatory, or even marginal. As that time has passed, it has become increasingly clear (to me at least) that the PL’s judgement, and the advice it has been receiving, has been severely lacking. That is also a material factor when evaluating what the judgment means.
Against all that, I feel that the club wouldn’t have responded in the way it did if it wasn’t supremely confident of the ground it was standing on, or the wider aims of the action, and if I was going to back any particular horse in this race it wouldn’t be the PL.
I therefore feel that the outcome of this action is far more positive than others have posited.
Whether I’m right or not, only time will tell.
And I agree with you that virtually all sports journalists are know nowt cunts :-)
