City launch legal action against the Premier League | City win APT case (pg901)

[Colin Bells Boots]

And that is exactly what is wrong with the structure of the PL. The PL should be proposing rules that are for the benefit of the league as a whole, not just any old rule stupid rule that 14 myopic clubs will vote for.

You can be sure Masters is talking to the legal people from Liverpool, Arsenal and United to decide what to do next. The ****.

I suspect they will be explaining that his suicide appears to be his next best move. All three clubs seem very keen on welfare issues .

 

[Colin Bells Boots]

Three that ruled in our favour are lawyers or barristers it seems The one against is a teacher.

Primary teacher ?

If true they should have no trouble explaining things, even to Masters .

 

[Gazza]

He's in his mid-30's and has spent all his career in academia, as a student, research fellow or a lecturer. Whereas Leaf is a practicing lawyer in Sports Law.

I think someone said on here a while back that an academic could have a very different standpoint on an issue compared to a "real" lawyer.

We've all worked with them, all the certificates from university and zero experience - when things in real life don't go as per the text book - they're fucked.

 

[Prestwich_Blue]

Can he do it on a cold wet day in Birmingham at the Small Claims Court?

And after a liquid lunch!

 

[Colin Bells Boots]

…and rallying around Richard. Guess he is on his own now.

in a single canoe heading down Shit Creek

 

[hello]

in a single canoe heading down Shit Creek

With or without the paddle?

 

[Chris in London]

In fairness, either City didn’t challenge the evidence effectively, thought it futile to challenge or the Tribunal rejected City’s arguments on the reality of RPTs. If City had made material submissions on the point, I suspect we’d have seen them in the judgment so, most likely, we tactically decided to fight other battles especially as it sounds like there were no documents disclosed on the topic before 2021.

In reality, it seems to me that it couldn’t be said to be that hard to challenge a designation of a RPT given that UEFA did exactly that in 2014 (assuming the press was true that it concluded both Etihad and Etisalat were actually RPTs "In 2014 Uefa’s consultants, reported to be PwC, are understood to have advised the CFCB that Aabar and Etisalat were “related parties” to City because Mansour was the chairman of the investment funds which owned them. After further research Uefa was also advised that Etihad should be considered a related sponsor because of relationships of Mansour’s with members of the extended ruling family involved in the airline." https://www.theguardian.com/footbal...accounting-sponsorships-uefa-champions-league) - although it didn’t bother in 2020.

City couldn’t make that submission however without bringing focus to UEFAs conclusion that City’s accounts were wrong on that point.

I agree the tribunal probably thought they had bigger fish to fry, but City plainly did challenge the explanation of why the new rules on APTs were introduced. What surprised me was that these apparent concerns the PL and the clubs had about why the previous RPT rules were ineffective was given so little scrutiny. The tribunal seems to have ignored the possibility that the evidence from the redshirts and others was self serving, and they seem to have ignored the possibility that concrete examples of the RPT system being abused appear to have been non existent. As you say, there may have been reasons on both sides not to rely too much on UEFAs failure to land the RPT allegations re Etihad but it has been known for a tribunal to be all the more interested in evidence that both sides appear not to want to dwell on.

Since we are looking at three exceptionally experienced lawyers I can’t see how they could have considered the evidence the PL was relying on without being at least aware of the possibility that City’s competitors were giving evidence against City for reasons of self interest. Nor is it obvious to me why such evidence as the PL relied on was subjected to so little critical analysis. The only conclusion that makes sense to my mind is that they thought it just didn’t matter.

Personally I can only find one piece of objective evidence that might be thought to justify the move from an ex post to an ex ante system, namely the length of time the 115 charges have taken to come to trial, and even that wasn’t subjected to any sort of analysis, eg that the PL plainly did nothing while the UEFA case was ongoing.

However in the final analysis I don’t think they were interested in second guessing why the PL chose to move to a different system. They were plainly satisfied that it wasn’t simply a change made for capricious or bad faith reasons - I just don’t think they needed that much persuading on that.

 

[Colin Bells Boots]

With or without the paddle?

either would be to no effect because he will be going backwards

 

[halfcenturyup]

He's in his mid-30's and has spent all his career in academia, as a student, research fellow or a lecturer. Whereas Leaf is a practicing lawyer in Sports Law.

I think someone said on here a while back that an academic could have a very different standpoint on an issue compared to a "real" lawyer.

The thing is, I think, that sports law doesn't really help much with sophisticated competition law cases. I am pretty sure the three arbitrators have as much competition law experience as it's possible to have. If not, the parties chose unwisely. The fact that nobody really knows what is going on doesn't reflect at all on the arbitrators but on everyone else who is scrambling around trying to make sense of it.

 

[Chris in London]

Got you. The Portsmouth one is interesting as that really shows the fallacy of the reasons behind putting in PSR in the first place as they’d have still have passed PSR. Including shareholder loans in APTs wouldn’t have changed their plight either, it was allowing shareholder loans at all rather than equity that ultimately was their downfall (similar with Abramovic and Chelsea recently).

That’s still the issue with PSR to me. Until it puts in measures that focus on the balance sheet as much as the P&L, it can’t be said to have sustainability as its main motivation, it just doesn’t make sense as it doesn’t go far enough to do that.

Or, Portsmouth was just a pretext for those who just wanted to make it harder for us…