Sports Direct have defeated Sevco in court, yet again, and another ban on the club being able to sell shirts through alternative merchandising firms is certain.
On top of that, Sevco has been ordered to pay legal fees in excess of £400,000 and they are also on the hook for damages which will be decided at a later hearing.
This is a catastrophe for them.
This site and a couple of others were pretty well ahead of the game on this one.
We suspected that King had decided to chance his arm here, and then an exclusive from Phil confirmed that legal action was in the pipeline. By the time the media caught up, the case was in court. Now the latest act of this saga has ended in Sevco being roundly defeated.
Ashley and his company have a written agreement, a legal agreement, which has already been stood up in court, which says that Sevco cannot enter into any sales arrangement with any other company without their prior permission. Their contract says they must be allowed to match any deal.
The contract is iron clad.
It is also open ended; they can continue to renew it year on year and there’s pretty much nothing the club can do about it.
Sevco and King do not want to deal with Ashley; they know that there will only be one winner in this saga.
Especially as the Sports Direct contract is framed so that Ashley can cherry pick the parts of the Sevco merchandising operation he wants – i.e. all the lucrative bits – and leave the scraps for other people. Those people would probably not be interested in his leftovers.
If Sevco hadn’t acted so abysmally, and unprofessionally, you could actually feel sorry for them and the way this guy has grafted them here. As it is, I feel no sympathy whatsoever. They are run more like a crime family than a football club, and things like this will happen when you do things that way.
Ashley will take no prisoners. He will suffer no fools.
King plays into his hands time and time again. This could all have been resolved amicably.
That word is not in the glib and shameless liars vocabulary.
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