The Truth About Wages (part two) 💵💵
How my data influenced cases from doping to UK football’s sexual abuse scandal
In the second part of this series based on my research into wages in sport, I want to tell you about some of the most impactful legal cases in which my work has played a key role.
When a professional footballer loses their career through injury, they sometimes take legal action and win huge sums in compensation. The most straightforward examples are when a player’s leg is catastrophically broken by what was clearly a reckless ‘over the top’ tackle. But even then, legal action can be complex and take years to play out, as in the case of Ben Collett, which I wrote about yesterday.
If such an event takes place before a player makes the first team, a judge or tribunal needs to decide what kind of a future that footballer would likely have had: Would they have made it as a pro? If so, at what level?
These are not simple matters.
I’ve been involved in numerous cases over the past 15 years, starting with the Collett case, but I am not the person who assesses player potential. Typically, that task falls to managers, coaches and other veterans of the game.
My role has been narrowly focused on pay. I give evidence simply about the average earnings in different divisions in different seasons, and I demonstrate the accuracy of these figures. I might also be asked to demonstrate how and why ‘big club’ wages are larger than other clubs, and how a player’s age and position in any given season might affect his earnings.
Some cases have been heard in the High Court, as Collett’s was. Others have unfolded in smaller courts. Some have taken place behind closed doors in what are known as Rule K arbitrations, where ‘footballing disputes’ are settled privately between parties in a process overseen by the FA.
Several times I’ve been consulted on cases but have not taken them on for various reasons. A year after the France and Liverpool international Mamadou Sakho was given a UEFA drugs ban in 2016, following a positive test for the fat-burner Higenamine, his lawyers contacted me. They asked if I could help in a case against the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), suing them for millions in damages for their role in wrecking his reputation.
As a result of his initial ban, Sakho missed the 2016 Europa League final for Liverpool against Sevilla and – much more damagingly for the player – he missed Euro 2016, a tournament on French home soil he had previously been nailed-on to play in.
Astonishingly, as early as late summer 2016, UEFA realised they had completely cocked things up: the drug in Sakho’s system wasn’t even on WADA’s banned list at the time. UEFA criticised WADA for lack of clarity over the status of Higenamine. And in came the lawyers.
By the time they contacted me, Sakho had left Liverpool and was playing for Crystal Palace on a four-year contract signed in summer 2017. The lawyers wanted to know how their client’s career might have played out differently without the mistaken drugs ban.
I could find out what participation and success bonuses he potentially lost by not appearing at Euro 2016, where France reached the final, which they lost 1-0 to Portugal.
“But you already have pretty much everything you need to make your own case,” I said. “Your client can tell you what he earned at Liverpool, and what he makes at Palace.”
I talked myself out of a commission, but they didn’t need my help. Sakho sued WADA, and won, with WADA being found guilty of defamation. The player received substantial undisclosed damages.
“WADA accepts that Mr Sakho did not breach the UEFA Anti-Doping Regulations, did not cheat, had no intention of gaining any advantage, and acted in good faith,” a WADA lawyer told an open court as part of the apology process.
Another case I didn’t take involved a lower league player who had been released (fired) for a disciplinary matter, but, after an independent evaluation of events, was found not to have behaved as accused. His lawyer called me to say if this incident hadn’t happened, his man’s career trajectory would have soared. The lawyer asked if I could provide a witness statement saying his client could easily have been earning £30,000 a week in the Championship by now?
“In a word?” I said. “No.”
I explained that the data is the data. It doesn’t change depending on who the client is, or what the case is. It’s just cold, hard numbers that can be shown to be true.
Sometimes when a professional footballer loses their career via injury, or loses the chance of having a career, they can take legal action, have a compelling case, and still get nothing.
This happened to eight victims of the predatory paedophile coach Barry Bennell. The eight sued Manchester City for what they claimed was City’s involvement in their horrific treatment. They had mostly come into contact with Bennell as teens in the 1980s, at a time when he was associated with City, although, crucially for City’s case, not technically employed by the club.
The UK’s football sexual abuse scandal exploded from November 2016 onwards when a former Crewe defender, Andy Woodward, alleged to The Guardian that Bennell had abused him at the club in the 1980s.
Bennell and multiple other coaches of his era were accused by many hundreds of footballers of sexual abuse. By the time the eight players’ case reached the High Court in London in December 2021, Bennell was serving a 34-year prison sentence for sexual offences against boys. He had been convicted on five separate occasions, four times in the UK and once in the USA.
My involvement began in 2017 when I received an email from a lawyer specialising in sexual abuse cases. He was handling dozens of historic football abuse cases. He explained that he was working for numerous players and there was no need for me to know their identities; that wasn’t material. He wanted to know if I could provide evidence of what professional players in various divisions earned on average between the early 1990s and mid-to-late Noughties. Or, in other words, what this cohort of players might have earned, if they’d made it, if they hadn’t dropped out of the game, or seen their lives fall apart, after being raped and molested by Bennell.
Cutting a long story short, over multiple years I worked with the lawyer on iterations of a witness statement to explain: ‘These are the numbers, and here’s why they are the best figures available.’ This involved endless emails, calls and clarifications. I did the work 80 per cent pro bono, or in other words, charged for a fifth of the time I spent on the case.
To this day I still don’t know how many players received settlements based on my statement, but I know they were numerous, with clubs up and down the country settling with victims quietly and out of court. I never knew who the victims were: I didn’t need to. The only reason I found out, quite late on, that my witness statement was being used in the City case was because it went to the High Court and became public.
‘Clubs up and down the country started settling with victims quietly and out of court’
City themselves set up their own compensation scheme for Bennell’s victims, albeit capped using a tariff scheme that awarded different amounts depending on the type and duration of abuse by Bennell. The damages tariff schedule ran from £5,000 for one incident of “indecent touching over clothing / kiss / exposure” to £65,000 for multiple rapes over more than one year. The eight men who ended up in the High Court in December 2021 felt those caps were arbitrarily too low, but more than that, they wanted their day in court, not a quiet apology and a moderate cheque.
City’s lawyers called Bennell as a witness via video link from prison to claim to the court that the men didn’t have a case. I cannot imagine how painful it must have been to be a rape victim of Bennell and then have him gaslight you in court.
I took the witness stand for a little more than an hour in December 2021, in effect to talk through my witness statement. For almost the entirety of that time, Manchester City’s QC went round in circles trying to get me to say I was an expert witness, as opposed to a witness of matters of fact.
There was a critical difference, as least as the claimants’ legal team saw it. Expert witnesses can on occasion be viewed as subjective, saying whatever is required for a fee. The testimony of a witness to matters of fact, on the other hand – if their statement is accepted under rigorous examination – can be taken as indisputable. It’s not opinion. It’s not conjecture. It’s fact.
The judge in the case, Mr Justice Johnson, had a background in economics and was forensic in his dissection of my statement. In his final judgement he noted (paragraph 158) that “There was no challenge to Mr Harris’ arithmetic” and then later (paragraph 385) “I accept and adopt Mr Harris’ figures”.
If the players had won their case, they would have received payouts based on the numbers the judge accepted from my statement. His final report even detailed how much. But despite Mr Justice Johnson concluding that Bennell was a "manipulative liar" and not a credible witness, and that each of the claimants had proved they were abused by him, the issue of Bennell’s technical employment – or rather not – by City at the time, meant the club were not responsible. The judge also noted it was due to the men's "selfless bravery" that Bennell was in prison. It was, ultimately, a dispiriting conclusion.
Tomorrow, in an attempt to lift the tone, I’ll explain how nerding around with football wage data can be fun, whether you’re trying to predict the winners of a World Cup, laughing at how bad some clubs are at managing their budgets, or marvelling at how other clubs spend smart, not big.
I've had a couple of messages that some readers are trying to comment but can't ... so I'm testing the comments section! Thanks for all the brilliant feedback so far.