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Is Your Agent a Lawyer?

Each year we look at dozens of cases where there has been extremely ambiguous drafting within a player’s contract with their Club.

Not all agents are lawyers and therefore not all are used to drafting complicated contract clauses. The wording should always be drafted by a lawyer so that there are no ambiguities where:

• the contract is supposed to give the player an option to extend the contract
• the pay differs between different divisions depending on promotion or relegation
• bonuses are dependent on certain events happening

Clubs will always try and wriggle out of additional payments at the end of a contract! The amount of bonuses and contractual payments that the Clubs try to avoid in these 12 cases alone totalled millions of pounds.

The moral is always get a Sports Lawyer to vet unusual contract clauses or ensure your agent uses one.

Image Rights

Since the beginning of the 2003/4 Season the Premier League has introduced a new standard playing contract which, on the one hand enables players to utilise Club’s logos, badges and undertake sponsorship and endorsement work in the Club’s kit, but on the other hand gives rights to the Club to use to Player’s name and image for free.

These rights can be excluded and it is possible to make the Club pay for the use of the Player's name, image and signature.

One International Premiership Player discovered this year that his Club and the Premier League had authorised Barclaycard to use his image and had profited from such endorsement whilst the player was unable to receive any money whatsoever for the advert.

When signing any new contract it is worth taking advice on this and other image rights issues.