Turmoil ensues as Bosman hits home

The long-running dispute between a number of National League clubs and Derry City over player transfers and the Bosman ruling took a turn for the worse last night.

The club announced, at a press conference in the Trinity Hotel, Derry, that it will tomorrow seek a High Court injunction preventing a league tribunal from setting fees for three players who have joined the Brandywell club from sides based on this side of the border over the past 18 months. Club secretary Des Doherty, a local solicitor, resigned his position in order to be available to the club in a legal capacity if required.

Both the club and the FAI maintained last night that the situation could be sorted out without the issue ending up in court, but that only seems possible at this stage if the tribunal, which is scheduled to take place tomorrow night, is postponed to allow further talks to take place.

Derry's move follows a remarkable vote at a National League Management Committee meeting last Monday night when club representatives voted by 16 to two in favour of a tribunal meeting being held. This happened in spite of an opinion, passed on to delegates in advance of the vote from the League's legal advisers, A & L Goodbody, that such an action would be unlawful.

Derry maintain that that legal opinion coincided with the one offered by their advisers in the aftermath of the ruling of the European Court of Justice on the Bosman case in December 1995.

Since then, they claim, they have acted entirely in accordance with what was widely accepted to be the position in the wake of the Court's ruling - that transfers between clubs in different legal jurisdictions involving out of contract players should not involve a fee.

Accordingly, Felix Healy signed Gavin Dykes, James Keddy and Richie Purdy from Sligo Rovers, UCD and Dundalk, respectively, without offering to pay any transfer fees. Over the same period he agreed to pay a total of around £67,000 in fees to clubs in Northern Ireland and Scotland for a number of players, including Liam Coyle, Eamon Doherty and, recently, Craig Taggart.

It is Sligo Rovers who have been most determined to challenge that prevailing wisdom, with club chairman, Ray Gallagher, consistently arguing that it is national associations rather than boundaries which count for the purposes of interpreting the ruling. He has recently received strong support for this view from UEFA, who cite FIFA's refusal to support Celtic's claim for a fee from Monaco (who are outside the EU, but part of the French FA) for John Collins.

Gallagher says that his legal advice differs markedly from the league's and he is certainly not alone in his belief that there has been a widespread misreading of the situation. Denis Cagney, who is the head of the EU/Competition Unit of Matheson Ormsby Prentice solicitors, argues strongly that the European Court of Justice would, if a case were to be brought, consider Derry's case in the context of the circumstances in which they joined the National League.

"I think the court would see it as unreasonable for them to invoke the Bosman ruling. It would have to consider the fact the offer of employment to the players involved in this case had only arisen because the clubs in the National League were prepared to facilitate Derry City by allowing them to play football at this level.

"Nobody could suggest that Derry could play in the Irish League, but then nobody is forcing them to play in the National League and I don't think that the court would allow a situation in which the clubs which have facilitated Derry would be made to suffer for it. I think," he concludes, "that the club would be expected to abide by the league's rules."

This is in stark contrast with the opinion offered by solicitors at Goodbody who were asked by the National League to offer its advice on the situation. They concluded, in a letter made available to all the club representatives, that "we believe that the National League would be acting unlawfully if it endeavoured to apply its transfer regulations in order to require Derry City to pay fees for out-of-contract players moving from a club in the Republic or vice-versa".

It is the decision of 16 of the club representatives at that meeting to disregard that advice which has infuriated Derry officials.

"Can you imagine any other supposedly professional body that would pay somebody a load of money for a legal opinion and then decide to completely ignore it?" asks Derry City chairman Kevin Friel, who insists that because of the legal advice his club has received any attempt now to agree fees for the players would open him and his fellow directors to a legal action by shareholders for misappropriation of funds. "Some of these 16 are the very clubs who are always crying about the league acting unprofessionally. Then they come along and do this. It's astonishing!"

He maintains Derry would like nothing better than to be treated in the same way as their southern counterparts, for this would allow them to sign players on free transfers from Northern Ireland as well as those from cross-channel. "It's not as if we're trying to turn this in our favour," says Friel, "even as it is we're not happy with the situation, but we're being put in a position in which we would be the only club on the island which wouldn't be benefiting from the Bosman ruling at all, which can't be fair."

That, agrees Cagney, would be the likely outcome if the majority of clubs are successful. Derry would be obliged to pay fees to other northern clubs, as they are located in the same jurisdiction, and to southern clubs, as they chose to be part of the National League. He rates, when pushed to give an estimate, the likelihood that the court would rule in this way at around 75 per cent. If that were to turn out to be the legal outcome the claims by several southern clubs that they are simply looking for the proverbial playing pitch to be levelled would start to sound hollow.

"The fact is," says Charlie McGeever of Finn Harps (the one club that voted with Derry last week), "that even as it stands this is going to work both ways. The contracts of all the players that Derry have signed are going to run out and at that stage clubs south of the border will then be able to sign them without paying a fee."

At St Patrick's Athletic, Pat Dolan suggests that a gesture by Derry, an offer perhaps to pay half of the tribunal value of a player (under the league's multiplier system Dykes alone would be valued at £17,500), might resolve the situation, but accepts without dispute that it's not really a suggestion that he would take kindly to were he in the position of his counterparts at Derry.

The one thing that everybody, it seems, is agreed upon is that the issue should have been sorted out long before now. Gallagher says that he has been trying without success to sit down with City officials for months, Friel expresses his disappointment that the FAI did not seek clarification from the European Court if it was not sure that their interpretation was correct.

FAI general secretary Bernard O'Byrne, meanwhile, expresses the hope that matters can be resolved, at least temporarily, and the immediate threat of High Court action averted.

Looks like it's yet another case for Irish football's fire brigade.