According to Leventhal we're off to the Court of Arbitration for Sport in November to appeal against FIFA’s decision that an U23 match appearance is an official match for contractural purposes. We’re on the hook for around £2.6m which will be owed to Zuniga in wages if we lose. We’d heard about the FIFA decision a while back but it seems we’ve not given up yet. It does seem pretty ludicrous to count a U23 match so I imagine there will be lots of interested observers in the football world waiting on the outcome.
How is it owed to Zuniga? Didn’t he go back to Napoli and then they sold him elsewhere? Is it the differential to what we agreed to pay him if he joined? What a mess.
Honestly seems bizarre to me that Under-23 fixtures are counted as appearances for a player who was signed for the Senior team. I think that's two cases we have at the CAS now, along with Mamadou M’Baye.
Farcical. Whilst FIFA’s ruling is crazy IMO, there’s no smoke without fire and that’s Zuniga, M’baye, and Gueye that we have disputes over in just a few years. It’s money we could burn through (kinda) in the PL - but they will be counting the cost now of every penny put into such efforts.
To be fair, I have sympathy for the Pozzos here. Counting U23 games as senior appearances is ludicrous. Who is M'Baye?
Briefest summary I can give: we signed a Senegalese youngster on a three year deal (per the club and his agent), sent him on loan for a year, he then denied he was under contract and signed for another club (Cadiz). Even his agent says he signed a 3 year contract. FIFA found in our favour but gave a farcical compensation of 25,000, banned Cadiz from transfers for two windows, and banned the player for about half a year. They appealed to quash the verdict, we appealed because the compensation is ridiculously low. Punishments and fines currently suspended due to Covid causing a backlog, but the case should happen fairly soon and is regarded as having significant implications for world football as, to quote the club's lawyer, "if a player can terminate a contract without just cause with no sporting sanctions or compensation to pay, this will be the end of contractual stability in football."
This can't be right. We released a video on the club's YouTube channel today with Zuniga talking about his goal against United whilst we're in a dispute about paying him £2.5m? Surely that can't be right? It was always reported that it triggered a fee to Napoli before, rather than wages. If it's true that we're in a legal battle over wages then club (and Zuniga for that matter) are even weirder than I thought for putting out that video!
Again, from that summary, hard to see how WFC are in the wrong, however it's a little damming that these situations seem to affect us a great deal more often than other clubs.
If you're like me you probably pay little attention to the affairs of other clubs, so I don't find it particularly odd; it's probably just confirmation bias at work. We pay a certain amount of attention to WFC and very little to everyone else, outside of the big news stories.
If most other clubs have situations like Guaye and so on, signing contracts in football is already null and void. I can't imagine this is normal fare. Maybe I'm wrong, but I doubt it.
I suspect it's more a case of Napoli not having paid him, saying it's our responsibility as we signed him, and us saying no, our position is that we didn't sign him so it's your responsibility. So Zuniga is owed money by someone, and the courts are still establishing who. I don't find it particularly strange that a business who is in court arguing over a contract hasn't paid out cash tied to the existence of the contract they're disputing. In fact, it would probably undermine their case if anything: "why did you pay him if you didn't think he was your player?".
I think compensation usually comes in before then so it usually doesn't end up in court. In most cases the guilty party, despite their protestations, knows what they did. My bet is that if OM don't pay us for Gueye then we'll end up in court on that case too, and by then the M'Baye precedent will have been set. Seems unlikely to me that we'll lose the M'Baye case, especially given the lawyer the club are using, but we shall see. Like you I do doubt this is normal fare, though. It's pretty brazen to ignore paperwork signed with another club. With all of the various bodies in world football federations who look over paperwork it seems highly unlikely to me that the UK bodies would have somehow overlooked a glaring problem in Gueye's papers that his new agent, who wasn't on the hook to make a penny from his move, somehow noticed.
I am not to surprised that we seem to have more than our fair share of legal spats, as "The Pozzos" do tend to try and play legal "Loopholes" more than most others do.
No, I just find it weird we chose today to post a chummy video with Zuniga with him merrily reminiscing about his goal against United!
When it comes down to it our dispute isn't with Zuniga, it's with Napoli. Zuniga's money just happens to be tied up in the middle because of it. It's certainly nothing personal towards Zuniga on the club's part. I suppose the takeaway from the video is that he probably understands the situation and doesn't hold a grudge against the club!
I thought the Pozzos were chummy with Napoli lol. Anyway, I'm sure this'll all be worked out where we pay something like half of his wages or something
We do treat players like cattle a bit, getting Mavis from the Market last week and dragging her off to the slaughterhouse for dog food.
And we are repaid with squads of players who don't give a **** about the club. One doesn't expect players to be fans of WFC, unrealistically, but players who see Watford as a temporary posting on their global travels won't care a jot if Watford are relegated as they will soon be shipped off to any other League on loan or as a make weight in some other horsetrading.
The trick is to make all players within the Pozzo network feel like Watford / Udinese is the destination, not just a stop along the way. Doesn't feel like we've always achieved that. Can't say we've done too badly out of it all things considered though.
Oh come on, we've not done too badly out of it, all things considered. Those things being 17 players out through not being interested to play or being sold. That's nothing, really.
