Practice area
Sports regulation and governing-body disputes
Disputes decided inside a sport's own rule-book, by a commission, an appeal board and an arbitral tribunal in turn. The evidence has to survive each of them, and sometimes a court after.
What the work is#
Reading the rule-book as the contract it is
A league's rules are re-issued every season, and their numbers move. Which edition governed the referral, the appeal and the arbitration is a question with a documentary answer — and usually the first one that matters.
Evidence for a commission, an appeal and an arbitration
A commission is not bound by court rules of evidence. An appeal reviews what the commission heard; an arbitration reviews the decision on narrow grounds. What is gathered for the first forum has to hold in the later ones without being rebuilt.
Financial rules and the accounts behind them
Profitability, related-party and squad-cost rules turn on a club's statutory accounts. Reconstructing what the accounts recorded, and what the rule required at the time, is the same file-reconstruction discipline the practice applies to auditors and advisers.
Compensation claims between clubs
A league's rules can allow one club to recover from another the losses caused by a proven breach. Those claims turn on the underlying findings, on a counterfactual season, and on limitation.
Who instructs this#
- Solicitors acting for a club, a player or an official in disciplinary or arbitral proceedings
- Clubs assessing a rival's proven breach and what it may have cost them
- Sponsors, commercial counterparties and insurers with exposure to a club's position
- Audit and advisory firms whose work on a club's accounts is in question
What you end up holding#
- A rule-edition map: which provisions governed each step, and how they were numbered
- A chronology of the proceedings, sourced to the published decisions and statements
- An evidence review that separates findings, allegations and reported commentary
- A findings memo written for the forum it is going to
Evidence the practice has done this#
The practice's research on the Premier League's proceedings against Manchester City, on football's appeal and arbitration machinery, and on the consequences a sanction has for players, sponsors, auditors and rival clubs is written up as three briefs, each checked against the published decisions, the rule-books and the statutes.
The briefs treat every finding as the commission's, under appeal, and name no one beyond the published record.
- →The Commission's decision, and what the record supports
- →Who hears an appeal in football, and where the courts come in
- →When a club is sanctioned: the contracts and people around it
Where to look yourself#
The official sources this work runs on. All free, all published by the body that made the record.
Arbitration Act 1996
The statute that governs league arbitrations and the courts' supervision of them
See also: Civil fraud — Where the same conduct is pursued in the courts: tracing, freezing orders and fraud claims.
probative.io is a research and investigations practice, not a law firm, and does not provide legal advice. This page describes the work the practice does and the sources it uses. It states no view on any particular matter, and nothing here should be read as advice on one.