Udo Onwere discusses Manchester City FC’s case against the Premier League

Partner Udo Onwere discusses Manchester City’s legal case against the Premier League and the PR surrounding it.

Udo’s comments were published in The i Paper on the 10th October 2024. You can read the full article here.

“There are going to be some soundings made next week, and then City are going to have to make a call on how they’re going to approach this. Are they just going to leave things alone until they deal with these 115 charges, or are they going to force things through and try and seek injunctions against the Premier League, or seek compensation?”

“Normally what happens in any sort of litigation is that the loser pays. City are going to try and say, ‘Look, we won the case, you have to pay our costs’. And the Premier League will argue the other way.

There’s a whole PR game being played here by Man City to try and put across the point that they’ve been successful in their claim, and they could again threaten to seek compensation just to try and put pressure on the Premier League to maybe fall into line.

And if they can get some support from other Premier League teams, that will bolster their situation as well. It’s a PR game, more than anything.”

“You can always threaten to put an injunction,

There are mini hurdles you have to get over.

That case has to be reasonably strong in the sense that it fits all of the rules that you need to be able to enforce the injunction, and also they have to be very mindful that it might be seen as being overly aggressive, which can actually lose support from other clubs.

Because they’re just using their financial might to pay for lawyers to be able to do all of these things, they do have that power to seek an injunction.”

“From a PR perspective, I don’t think that they’re going to seek injunctions or compensation costs. They’re probably just going to garner support from teams in these meetings that they have and see what happens with the 115 charges that they’ve got against them.”