The manager and players of a former Premier League soccer club plan to sue the team they feel caused their relegation from England’s top division by fielding Argentina striker Carlos Tevez.
Tevez, who scored seven goals for former club West Ham United in the last 10 games of the 2006-2007 season, netted in the team’s final game to ensure that the London club moved ahead of Sheffield United in the standings.
Sheffield United reached an out-of-court settlement with West Ham on Monday that seemed to have resolved the long-running dispute, with the Hammers agreeing to pay a staggered compensation package of about US$30 million.
However, about 20 unnamed players are now looking into recovering the bonuses and image rights they would have received by keeping the club in the top flight. Those claims would amount to about £5 million (US$7 million).
Lawyer Chris Farnell, who is acting on behalf of the players, was in correspondence with West Ham’s legal team last week and wants a response by the end of this week.
“We are waiting to hear back from the lawyer at West Ham and, depending on what they have to say, will dictate the next course of action,” Farnell said on Tuesday. “I will be meeting with the majority of players and speaking to all of the players concerned individually before the end of this week, with a view to continuing this matter.”
If West Ham don’t respond “they will leave us with no other option but to pursue the matter formally, most likely through arbitration,” Farnell said.
West Ham said it had received “no formal legal claims” from the players or former Sheffield United manager Neil Warnock, who also said he could pursue a personal compensation claim.
“I’ll be looking into this now. I just wanted to see the club’s case out of the way first,” said Warnock, who is now the manager at Crystal Palace. “As far as I’m concerned, I should still be a Premier League manager. And I think the players have a case, too.”
West Ham, though, said there was “no basis for claims being brought outside of the arbitration process.”
“However, it is now becoming clear that the ruling by Lord Griffiths has encouraged a potentially endless legal chain of claims and counter claims, which can only be damaging to English football,” the club in a statement.
Sheffield United were relegated at the end of the 2007 season when the Hammers beat Manchester United on the final day of the campaign and Tevez scored the decisive goal. However, the Premier League later fined West Ham after ruling that Tevez and Javier Mascherano should not have been eligible to play for the club under third-party ownership rules.
Bayer 04 Leverkusen go into today’s match at TSG 1899 Hoffenheim stung from their first league defeat in 16 months. Leverkusen were beaten 3-2 at home by RB Leipzig before the international break, the first loss since May last year for the reigning league and cup champions. While any defeat, particularly against a likely title rival, would have disappointed coach Xabi Alonso, the way in which it happened would be most concerning. Just as they did in the Supercup against VfB Stuttgart and in the league opener to Borussia Moenchengladbach, Leverkusen scored first, but were pegged back. However, while Leverkusen rallied late to
If all goes well when the biggest marathon field ever gathered in Australia races 42km through the streets of Sydney on Sunday, World Marathon Majors (WMM) will soon add a seventh race to the elite series. The Sydney Marathon is to become the first race since Tokyo in 2013 to join long-established majors in New York, London, Boston, Berlin and Chicago if it passes the WMM assessment criteria for the second straight year. “We’re really excited for Sunday to arrive,” race director Wayne Larden told a news conference in Sydney yesterday. “We’re prepared, we’re ready. All of our plans look good on
The lights dimmed and the crowd hushed as Karoline Kristensen entered for her performance. However, this was no ordinary Dutch theater: The temperature was 80°C and the audience naked apart from a towel. Dressed in a swimsuit and to the tune of emotional music, the 21-year-old Kristensen started her routine, performed inside a large sauna, with a bed of hot rocks in the middle. For a week this month, a group of wellness practitioners, called “sauna masters,” are gathering at a picturesque health resort in the Netherlands to compete in this year’s Aufguss world sauna championships. The practice takes its name from a
When details from a scientific experiment that could have helped clear Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva landed at the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), the leader of the organization’s reaction was unequivocal: “We have to stop that urgently,” he wrote. No mention of the test ever became public and Valieva’s defense at the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) went on without it. What effect the information could have had on Valieva’s case is unclear, but without it, the skater, then 15 years old, was eventually disqualified from the 2022 Winter Olympics after testing positive for a banned heart medication that would later