Crystal Palace at CAS: What could club argue as they try to win back Europa League spot?

New York Times

3 days ago

Common sense would suggest that confirmation of John Textor's exit from Crystal Palace should resolve the issues around the Premier League club's connection to French side Lyon. After all, the American investor has now both sold his Palace stake and left all positions of authority at Lyon.
Unfortunately, one person's common sense is another's opinion — fun to debate, but not the best foundations for a cross-border sports competition involving huge prizes.
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To do that, you are better off with a set of written rules which are fair, proportionate, transparent and well-drafted. If they are not, well, that's why we invented lawyers.
This is where Palace find themselves: denied entrance to the Europa League, the competition they qualified for by winning last season's FA Cup, and effectively demoted to the third-tier Conference League for breaching European football governing body UEFA's multi-club ownership (MCO) rules.
And so Palace are taking their case to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), asking the so-called 'supreme court' of worldwide athletic endeavour to overturn UEFA's decision.
Palace have also named Nottingham Forest and Lyon in their appeal, as their fellow Premier League side have been elevated from the Conference League to the second-tier Europa League at their expense, while their disputed stablemates from Ligue 1 have been left in the Europa League, as their higher domestic league finish of the two sides trumps winning the FA Cup.
Steve Parish, Palace's chairman, will not mind which of those clubs CAS demotes, as long as what he views as the 'terrible injustice' of his team being removed from the Europa League is reversed. He believes he must take this fight on for Palace's players, staff and fans, as well as others who might find themselves in this position one day. And he clearly thinks this would not happen to a bigger, established side, so there is an 'us versus them' element to his crusade.
Having said all that, how could Palace go about persuading CAS?
It was then International Olympic Committee (IOC) president Juan Antonio Samaranch who first realised global sport needed an in-house method for washing dirty linen, as the regular courts are expensive, potentially embarrassing and painfully slow. With the IOC willing to pay for it all, housing it in Lausanne, the Olympic Movement's Swiss home, made sense.
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CAS opened in 1984 and, initially, three-person panels picked from a small pool of experts nominated by the IOC, its president and Olympic federations made decisions about commercial and disciplinary arguments.
The system worked pretty well until 1992, when the International Equestrian Federation found a German rider named Elmar Gundel guilty of doping his horse and banned him. When CAS rejected his appeal, Gundel took his fight to Switzerland's Federal Supreme Court. He did not get much joy there either, but the court did agree that the link between CAS and the IOC was too cosy.
The result was the 1994 creation of the International Council of Arbitration for Sport (ICAS), an arms-length body that would run and finance CAS for all Olympic and Paralympic sports. When the World Anti-Doping Agency was created in 1999, CAS was also formally established as the last stop for doping cases.
Its workload has increased each year.
In 2024, more than 900 cases were submitted to CAS, with about 300 progressing to full-blown hearings. It now has 45 permanent staff, plus around 400 experts serving as visiting arbitrators, who are housed in a purpose-built office in Lausanne's poshest convention centre.
The basic proposition has not changed much. Each side in a dispute chooses a member of the panel, with those two usually picking a third expert from the pool to be the panel's chair. If they can't decide, ICAS will select one.
Hearings are private, with costs kept low. Verdicts typically come within six to 12 months but expedited hearings are held for matters in need of quick answers, such as doping cases during an ongoing Olympics and over Palace's predicament. The draw for the final round of Conference League qualifying is a week today (August 4), with those two-legged ties then scheduled for August 21 and 28. Palace, Forest and Lyon need to know ASAP which competition they're in.
In terms of results, sports federations still tend to win the day, as Gundel discovered, but Manchester City famously beat UEFA at CAS in 2020, while Paul Pogba's doping ban was reduced from four years to 18 months last year, saving his career.
Palace's starting point is likely to be that Textor, whose Eagle Football Group still contains his controlling stakes at Brazilian side Botafogo, Belgian's RWDM Brussels (rebranded from Molenbeek earlier this year) and Lyon, did not have what UEFA calls 'decisive influence' at Selhurst Park, and that they have never been part of his multi-club group.
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This, you would think, is supported by the fact he has just sold his 43 per cent stake in Palace to Woody Johnson, the billionaire owner of the NFL's New York Jets and former U.S. ambassador to the UK. Furthermore, that 43 per cent stake only gave Textor one of four voting shares at Palace, with Parish and two other American investors, David Blitzer and Josh Harris, also holding one each.
As Textor has previously explained to The Athletic, decisions at Palace very rarely, if ever, went to a vote, as Blitzer and Harris are silent partners who trust Parish to run things. So, Parish would always have 75 per cent of the votes, and he had no interest in Textor's plan to integrate the Londoners into the Eagle multi-club universe.
Blitzer, Harris, Parish and Textor all went to UEFA's headquarters in the Swiss city of Nyon last month to make this point but the Club Financial Control Body (CFCB), the arms-length unit that decides which teams can and cannot be licensed to play in the three European competitions, wasn't buying it.
Instead, it ruled that Textor's influence was decisive at Palace because he has injected more than £100million ($134m at the current rate) into the club since 2022, money that helped them finish their new-look academy facilities and sign players, and was the largest single shareholder which meant he must, at the very least, have had a say in what they could and could not do. A decisive say? Well, that is why CAS exists.
Dr Antoine Duval is the head of Asser International Sports Law Centre in the Netherlands and a seasoned watcher of CAS's decision-making. He believes it's possible the CAS panel will disagree with the CFCB assessment but says the 'quality of the evidence provided by Palace about its internal management structure and the role, or lack of it, of Textor/Eagle will be crucial'.
Textor's voting rights will be a key consideration for CAS, but so will his financial contributions and influence on recruitment and commercial strategy.
For example, he was a strong advocate of appointing Oliver Glasner, the Austrian head coach who led Palace to their FA Cup triumph, in February last year, although he recently insisted on UK radio station Talksport that the notion he 'made the hire (at Palace) happen… that's not true at all. I tried to get him at Lyon — if he spoke French, he'd be there. I told UEFA that a suggestion is not decisive influence. Nobody tells Steve (Parish) what to do, he's as stubborn as anybody.'
Palace, no doubt, will say the only player to be transferred between them and Lyon was centre-back Jake O'Brien in 2023: beyond some young players going on loan to Molenbeek (including O'Brien, earlier in his career), they had no other transactions with an Eagle Football Group club, despite Textor's frequent suggestions.
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But Dr Gregory Ioannidis, an experienced campaigner at CAS and an associate professor at Sheffield Hallam University, is not sure this will be enough to sway the panel.
He believes Palace will try to argue that a 'more flexible and purposeful interpretation of the regulations' should be applied, with the club's lawyers asking the panel to think about what UEFA is trying to achieve with its MCO rules, fair competition, and whether the English side pose any threat to that legitimate aim.
'But if the panel decides the rules are clear, and therefore a strict and literal approach needs to be applied, the chances for a successful appeal will be minimised,' explains Ioannidis.
While each case is considered on its own merits, precedents can be helpful, and two CAS panels have recently made very quick decisions on MCO cases involving Slovakian team FC DAC 1904 and Drogheda United from the Republic of Ireland.
Both were blocked from playing in the Conference League by the CFCB and then lost their appeals, DAC unanimously and Drogheda on a majority verdict. The two cases were different but both argued they simply did not have enough time to create the separation UEFA requires between them and their MCO sister clubs.
As MCO groups have proliferated across Europe, UEFA has given owners two options: reduce your stake in one of the clubs that want to compete in the same competition to less than 30 per cent, step down as a director and halt whatever player-trading strategy you are pursuing with the two teams, or put one of into a blind trust, so you have no influence over day-to-day operations. Crucially, UEFA moved the deadline for doing one or the other of these workarounds from early June to March 1. DAC, Drogheda and Palace all missed this memo.
However, in both the DAC and Drogheda cases, the CAS panels backed UEFA.
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'What is of immense importance here is the panels' findings that the current regulations do not require evidence of actual influence, but rather only the possibility of such influence,' says Ioannidis. 'This, in conjunction with the finding on the procedural aspect of submitting the changes in the club's ownership structure on time (or not), may cause serious difficulties for those arguing Palace's case.'
Parish has explained in recent interviews that Palace were too busy playing Championship neighbours Millwall in the last 16 of the FA Cup on March 1 to be thinking about what might happen if they were to win the whole thing and play in Europe for the first time in their history, but Duval says the deadline argument is doomed.
'It seems to me that a possible argument about the new deadline has already been rejected, thus the main focus will probably be on whether Textor had decisive influence,' he says.
And while Palace will come armed with evidence that shows Textor was routinely ignored, UEFA's lawyers will no doubt point to the letter CFCB chair Sunil Gulati sent to the club licensing managers at UEFA's 55 member associations last May which spells out what 'decisive influence' means.
A literal reading of that document — the 30 per cent shareholding threshold, significant financial support, being a director, the ability to influence recruitment decisions and so on — would suggest Palace's legal team are going to have their work cut out.
Given all that, it might make sense for Palace to make a more general argument that a strict application of the rules in this case simply make no sense, as there is obviously no threat to the integrity of the competition, which is the entire point of article 5.01 in UEFA's rulebook, the regulation that deals with MCO clubs.
And there is some encouragement here, in that the concepts of fairness, integrity and sporting justice are all enshrined in Swiss law.
But there are risks attached to this approach, too.
'Swiss law does protect such principles and both CAS and the Swiss Federal Tribunal (where any appeals over a CAS verdict are heard but rarely upheld) have ruled accordingly,' says Ioannidis.
'However, I wouldn't run this argument, because the panel may take the view that it is precisely for these principles that UEFA's decision may be upheld, as the other clubs in the competition acted promptly and ensured they followed the rules and deadlines.'
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That said, the Drogheda case shows that one of the panel disagreed with his colleagues. The written judgment has not been published, so we do not know why they disagreed but it is possible the Irish club's plea for a more common-sense-based assessment of the rules was persuasive.
Palace may think that if they can do the same, they are halfway there.
'Not everything is negative for Palace,' says Ioannidis. 'I would argue that the intention of the regulator is to ensure fair competition. As such, the fact that Palace may have realised their mistake and acted in compliance with the rules, albeit late, shows a genuine and honest approach to the legitimate aim pursued by UEFA.
'In this instance, it would be fair, just and reasonable for UEFA to allow Palace to be admitted to the Europa League.'
Another possible line of attack for Palace is the apparent inconsistencies in the application of UEFA's rules — and this is where the decision to make Forest a party in this appeal is intriguing.
The argument, presumably, would be that Evangelos Marinakis, owner of both Forest and Greece's Olympiacos, did not place the former in a blind trust until the end of April, a move he reversed when they eventually failed to join their cousins from Athens in next season's Champions League. It is a moot point now but Marinakis seemed to miss the UEFA deadline, too, and, if literal readings are important, you either meet it or you don't.
If Palace wanted to be really mischievous, they could ask what Marinakis was doing on the pitch at the end of Forest's home draw against Leicester City on May 11. While he may well have been checking on the health of an injured Forest player, the episode suggested the Greek billionaire still exerted some influence at the City Ground despite that blind-trust move.
And, just to add some further spice to the pot, Parish has suggested that Forest played a part in Palace's demotion to the Conference League.
But an argument that effectively depends on the panel accepting that it is OK for a club to be confused about the regulations is unlikely to pan out.
'The rules and deadlines have always been there, and Palace had to act promptly, irrespective of what other clubs did,' says Ioannidis. 'The panel might say that a professional club, with an army of expert lawyers, ought to be more diligent and proactive. If confused, they could have asked UEFA for clarification.'
And with that sensible advice, we should probably wrap this up and wait for CAS to make sense of it all. Hopefully.