I remember reading a few years ago a club (can't remember who) wanted to take legal action against the FA, but didn't follow it through because the FA would punish them? So if the Allams take the FA to court over the name change will the club be punished?
It's against FIFA rules for any football club to take legal action against their governing body, they can only go to arbitration, but based on the clueless way everything else has been handled, they probably don't even know that.
The only challenge they can make would appear to be to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS). Whatever they do it will just drag the whole mess on and on. They will be at Wembley on 13th April shaking hands with the very people they are going to take action against, competing for the cup bearing that associations name. It will further delay preparations for next season, regarding shirts and season passes and will do nothing to help the current team. It's all very tawdry.
It will be in the terms of sale for next years passes that by buying a pass you support the owners and all their plans for the club and by opposing anything they want to do will leave you liable to have your pass cancelled without refunding. Then they'll just go again next season with the 'unanimous backing' of the fans.
I want somebody to take the clueless FA on. Our FA are simply not fit for purpose on so so many levels. Putting our issue to one side the FA are a disgrace and need to be put down. But it would back fire for sure. The FA dont like it up em at all.
Correct. Just one of many things they get wrong. The list is endless when it comes to FA incompetence.
I suspect they'd open the process, some lawyer would spend months charging them a fortune to investigate it and put a case together and then come to the conclusions below that took me next to no time to research. Either the lawyer would tell them to drop it before it got to court, or if they took it to court and we got sanctioned by the FA, the next step for the Allams once it was dismissed in about 30 seconds by the FA legal team playing a clip from Ehab's interview to the court would be to sue the lawyer for damages coming from his malpractice for not spotting the bleeding obvious flaw. They destroyed their legal case the second they admitted there hadn't been a single approach to sponsor us as Hull Tigers rather than Hull City. The club is in a contract as a member of the FA that gives the FA absolute discretion over changes of names to it's members. In order for the refusal to accept the change to be an abuse of that power the club would need to show that the reasons for refusing it were commercially unreasonable (I've forgotten the name of the legal case that set the precedent for it now, which is embarrassing as that's also the name of the test that's applied). All the FA needs to do in defence is show that that either it didn't hurt the club (which the radio statement about no offers does for them), or that it would commercially harm the FA or other member clubs if they'd allowed it. Obviously the second part of that the easiest argument is that it was commercially reasonable to refuse it as it would set a precedent that clubs could change names and that would expose the FA and it's stakeholders to a decline in the value of their products due to the loss of traditional names on the basis they market their products around the history of the game. The fact the FA is a member's club and is to act in a manner protecting its membership as a whole produces a Catch 22 situation as well: 1) if it didn't hurt us then it's fine to refuse it. 2) if it did hurt us to refuse it then it's because we were going to gain an advantage over other clubs. If we were going to gain an advantage over other clubs then it was fine to refuse it. The second part wouldn't in itself do it as a reason to refuse outright, either for the protection of the other clubs or for the FA as it would be a restriction of trade in that sense. But it is a condition that would allow the FA to say that if they or any other club were commercially disadvantaged by the results of the change it would be necessary for the club to neutralise this by providing funds to whoever lost out by way of compensation (in which case everyone would commercially benefit as lets say it brought in £100M in additional income, it would be split between the parties concerned so it should be accepted), but that is effectively destroying the case for trying to change the name and I can't see them wanting to do all the gambling just to let other clubs cream off most of the money for themselves.
