Burnwinter wrote:Given the funds dedicated to our operations team and the sums of money involved in these transfers, it's a disgrace that we're bidding on star players without a forensic legal analysis of their contractual situation, based on the actual documents, in place.
I really don't think we did. No company in the world would ever do it and I don't think any football club would either. It doesn't make a lick of sense when you look at it from a business perspective.
Rather, I think that the particular wording of the clause is what got Liverpool off the hook in the end. They clearly didn't fulfill their contractual obligation towards Suarez because they rejected the bid outright and never even 'negotiated in good faith' or whatever the phrase was. Suarez had the players' union behind him too who, after reviewing the contract, initially agreed that the clause should have been valid. A week or two later Gordon Taylor changed his mind and backed Liverpool instead.
I would bet every cent I own that both we and Suarez had a bunch of lawyers looking at the clause carefully; us before we made the bid and him after Liverpool rejected it. In the end Suarez's representatives simply concluded that it was too dubious and that any legal process would spill into the season and cost him a year of his career that he couldn't afford to lose. I wouldn't be surprised if it goes down as a landmark case in the future. The PFA will advise players to be very specific with these kind of clauses from now on.
