I've been thinking about this the last few days. My thinking can be slow and deliberate so it can take me a few days and a lot of thinking to get my head round things properly. We don't know with certainty what the PL have got or what the specifics of the various charges are.
But there's at least two substantive charges, and we think we know they relate to Mancini's contract with Al Jazira and image rights payments to players. With respect to the former, the PL would have to prove Mancini did not fulfil that contract to provide at least 4 days consultancy per year. Conversely, we need to show he did, and we should be cleared on any of the charges relating to that.
The image rights one is more difficult to call. Those were paid by Fordham from 2013-14 to 2017-18 as far as I can see but the charges also seem to pre-date 2013. Fordham paid us for those rights in the 2012-13 financial year and we assigned the intellectual property of those image rights to them, which they then apparently paid. It's a strange, but not illegal, arrangement that I suspect was used to generate revenue in that financial year when we thought there was a chance we could escape punishment using the Annex XI provisions. I wonder if we'd have done it in different circumstances? This is the one I feel we'll be more vulnerable on than the Mancini charges.
But both of these were part of the material put out by Der Spiegel, based on the hacked emails. The question is, if these are all they've got, then there's nothing new from 2018 but neither of these came up in the UEFA charges arising from Der Spiegel articles. So did UEFA decide they weren't worth pursuing or did they try to focus solely on the sponsorship stuff that they thought was the most egregious breach? Either way, it gives me confidence.
One thing we also know from the previous battle with UEFA is that we didn't cooperate (on legal advice I might add) because we thought they were 'fishing'. I wonder if we took the same stance with the PL, who then had to resort to stuff that was known to UEFA but they didn't pursue, potentially for reasons I outlined above.
I therefore suspect there's little new in these charges and that mainly it's a rehash of the Der Spiegel stuff, and stuff that was either time-barred or that UEFA didn't pursue. And out of that, they've generated dozens of charges making things seem much worse than they really are.
