Liz Coley

Liz Coley is a Partner at Level. Liz has over twenty years’ experience working in the football industry, having worked for four professional football clubs and The FA prior to qualification as a lawyer. 

1. When did the idea of becoming a sports lawyer cross your mind? 

My route to where I am today is a little bit different to most sports lawyers. I worked for The FA and a number of football clubs prior to qualification, so for me, being a sports lawyer wasn’t first and foremost in my mind. It was more the case that I was working at football clubs, drafting player contracts and transfer agreements and dealing with those sort of documents, and seeing that other clubs were having external legal help as not many clubs at that time had in-house lawyers. So, I was just a bit concerned that there were people who were much better qualified, in terms of drafting agreements, on the other side of the deal. Although I’d worked at The FA and then dealt with player registrations and player contracts previously, there were people on the other side of documenting agreements who were so much more legally experienced than me. I thought, “Hang on, am I doing the best for my club here?”

So, I started to study law about 10 years after I actually started working. I completed a Master’s in International Sports Law, but I was one of the few people on that course who wasn’t a law graduate. I achieved my place on the course because of my undergraduate degree and my work in sport, but it was quite difficult doing a law-based Master’s when you didn’t have a legal background when they’d talk about a tort or something like that. If you’ve never studied law, you have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about. 

In 2008, there was a change of ownership at Southampton and my role as Club and Company Secretary was sadly made redundant. I started my GDL, which I undertook part-time at The College of Law. My plan at that stage was to remain working in-house in football clubs and use my legal knowledge to do a better job and protect my employer’s/club’s position better when I was dealing with various types of agreements. 

This is probably a long-winded way to say I never really expected to be working in private practice as a sports lawyer. My original intention was to continue working at football clubs but with a better legal understanding, but that’s not how it panned out in the end. 

2. How did you find completing your training contract in-house at Sunderland AFC?

I was really fortunate. I haven’t got a top-notch academic background; I haven’t got straight A’s at A-level. I’d been looking at applications for training contracts and they weren’t really set up, in terms of the application form itself, for people who didn’t come through the standard routes into qualification. They weren’t really appropriate at that time for someone who’d worked for many years and had lots of experience post-education, it was more about academic achievements and things like that. So, I was very fortunate that while I was working at West Ham United, the opportunity to move to Sunderland came up. The then-Club Secretary and Head of Legal was being promoted to Chief Executive and she was very happy to offer me a training contract sitting alongside the role of Club Secretary. She’d already trained one person in-house at the club, and so for me the opportunity to be able to combine a job that I loved and that I’d done for many years with doing my training contract was fantastic. The role of Club Secretary, as I am sure you are aware, is a very demanding one where you’re working long hours and quite often, 7 days a week, so they allowed me to have day release, so I went to the College of Law at York every Tuesday to do my LPC. The club also recognised that I probably couldn’t gain everything I needed in-house to fulfil the requirements of the training contract, so they gave me the opportunity to spend some time with their commercial law firm, Muckle, based in Newcastle. I spent time there in their Employment team, which was obviously very useful to take back to my role at the club. I then spent the final six months of my training contract at Muckle full-time in their Real Estate team. So, it was a fantastic opportunity for me as it allowed me to continue working in football and get qualified at the same time. 

3. What is the most rewarding case or project that you have worked on? 

Obviously, there are lots of very interesting ones. Being a football fan, it is fantastic working in sports law, specifically working in football, it’s not a boring job. The most rewarding, exciting, and interesting case was shortly after I joined Walker Morris, my previous firm. I was involved a Premier League manager’s arbitration tribunal acting for Crystal Palace FC against their former manager, Tony Pulis, who had left the club suddenly just prior to the start of that season. I worked very closely with a former colleague at Walker Morris who was a good number of years more qualified than me (Alistair McHenry, now Head of Sports at TYR), especially in the lead up to the hearing itself. It didn’t get heard until the start of 2016, so it was about eighteen months or so build-up leading up to the hearing itself, but it was my first exposure to something of that nature and also working extremely closely with leading counsel, who was Ian Mill QC and his junior, David Lowe. The hearing was over eleven days, so there was a massive amount of preparation and work every night during the case. It was long hours, it was hard work, but the outcome for Crystal Palace was excellent.  It felt really good to have played a significant part in getting that outcome for them which obviously later on became widely reported. I learned so much from working with my colleague, Alistair, and with counsel. It was an amazing experience for someone who was only recently qualified at that stage and made even sweeter by the fact we got a good result. 

4. What are some of the key legal developments in football at the moment? 

One of the things that is out there at the moment is the Fan-Led Review of Football Governance. I was involved in Nick de Marco’s podcast recently, The Sports Law Podcast, and we touched on this subject in case anyone is interested in listening further about this. 

-Listen to ‘What do Football Lawyers Do?’ on Apple.
-​Listen to 'What do Football Lawyers Do?' on Spotify.
-Listen to 'What do Football Lawyers Do?' on other devices.  

One of the recommendations of that report is that there should be an independent football regulator in this country, which is an interesting point. Obviously, these are recommendations and whether they actually happen is completely another matter, but we discussed whether, if implemented, this would cause an issue with FIFA and UEFA and their strong stance that there should be no government intervention in the game. It will be interesting to see how that point pans out.

Obviously, it’s a huge report and there were several areas of the report that I had a specific interest in. Another of them was the recommendation that there should be mandatory clauses in player contracts in relation to salary increases on promotion and salary decreases on relegation. They believed that this would avoid clubs negotiating these clauses out of the contract as part of their recruitment strategy. It will be interesting to see whether that is something that will be pushed forward because, at the moment, it would require an amendment to the standard player contract which would need the agreement of the stakeholders in the game. The EFL, as it stands, says that the salary of a player should be documented in respect of every league that the club could play in throughout the duration of the contract, but that is only in relation to salary; it doesn’t cover bonuses and things like that. The Premier League has no sort of similar rule, just that you have to make sure that the terms that have been agreed are included in the contract. 

5. Do you have any predictions for the future of football and/or sports law? 

I think we all would like to have a crystal ball at times to see how things would pan out. As long as there is significant money in the game of football – I use football as an example because that’s the area I work predominantly in – there will be requirements for sports lawyers to be involved in terms of drafting contracts and transfers and dealing with commercial matters amongst other areas. The higher the monetary value, the more likelihood of issues which need resolving, arguments about payments and disputes that might arise which require legal assistance. 

I mentioned earlier that when I was working at Southampton about 20 years ago now, there were not many in-house lawyers at football clubs. There might have been a local lawyer sitting on the Board, but generally there wasn’t much in the way of in-house counsel at clubs and now we see the biggest clubs having double figures of lawyers working for them. So, I can only see that increasing; more and more Premier League clubs are getting a number of in-house lawyers, and that trend is spreading down into the Championship. Certainly, if they don’t have anybody in-house, they will have lawyers retained to assist them on matters. I believe LawInSport are actually looking at a programme at the moment in terms of providing legal assistance to clubs further down the EFL who don’t have anyone in-house, so I can only see that area of the game growing. 

6. What do you think makes working as a lawyer in football unique? Are there any skills that are particularly required?

For me, ‘unique’ is the right word, because no two days are the same. The industry itself is unique. I imagine being a sports lawyer, a football lawyer, sounds really interesting to a lot of people. Some areas are interesting, some areas are high-profile and exciting. However, it’s not all about dealing with high-profile players signing with their clubs or high-profile disputes. There are the more mundane issues which take place in any company. Also, for me, it’s not just dealing with Premier League and EFL clubs, it’s assisting clubs in non-league football as well as well as assisting players and intermediaries. 

I think in terms of skills, attention to detail is a must, but that is the same for any lawyer working in any area. But what is unique about football law? I would say football works almost 24/7. You need to be extremely responsive. It’s not the sort of job that you can say, “Right, it’s 5 o’clock, I’m going home.” I was working on a player loan yesterday [02/08/2022]; we were still dealing with it at 10 o’clock last night and my phone was ringing before 9 o’clock this morning on it. You need to be available, you need to be responsive to your clients, which can be at anti-social hours, often over weekends or late in the evening. If you don’t respond to them when they need you, then they’ll find someone who can. It’s an industry where there’s a lot of interest and there’s a lot of competition. There are lawyers who are prepared to work for clubs for next to nothing, to try and get their foot in the door, to be able to say they’ve got a high-profile client or a certain football club as a client. 

I think in terms of the uniqueness of it, I would say needing to be responsive and understanding the pressures that clubs are placed under are key areas. Having worked directly for four clubs, I probably understand as well as anybody the pressures that the club execs are placed under when it comes to signing players from both their boards and their managers, what needs doing and if that means working late then you get on and do it because that’s part of the role. 

7. What advice would you give to aspiring sports lawyers?

It links back to the previous question in terms of the need to be accurate, the need to be responsive, be available and ready to assist at all times. If your phone rings at 9pm, that could be a massive job for you. I’ve had calls late in the evening where things have cropped up that if I hadn’t had responded to at that point of time, that work would have gone to somebody else. So, it’s needing to be available, needing to have your phone with you to pick up your emails, to pick up your calls. 

For aspiring sports lawyers, the best advice I could give is the advice I used to give when I worked at a football club when people would say to me, “I would love to work at a football club, how do you get into that?” I would say to get some experience in the sport that you’re interested in working in, even if it’s volunteering somewhere. Look at all the EFL clubs who don’t have any legal assistance, if you’ve got one local to you, you’re a lawyer and you want to get involved, offer them your assistance. For me, it really helps to be able to say to clients that I’ve got the experience of working directly for four clubs and for The FA, and that I’ve been seconded to a number of other clubs. They’re comfortable that I understand the industry and the pressures that they face, so I think if you can actually get some sort of experience and can demonstrate to your clients that you’ve got an understanding of the industry itself, that will be really important to them. 

8. Please can you describe a typical day in your life? 

Like I said, no two days are really the same. A lot of my role, and I predominantly work with football clubs, but I do some work with intermediaries and players as well, is dealing with issues as they arise and they can be very, very wide-ranging. At the moment, I’m dealing with player contracts, loans, transfers, employment contracts for coaching staff and managers, and also the player terminations that you get at this time of the year so a player can go and join another club now or even after the transfer window closes. Work-wise, there is no real typical day. It goes from some days being relatively steady, to other days having so much work that you feel you’re doing about a week’s work in a day. Quite often, everything turns up at once! 

Personally, I live in the North East, I live by the coast, so I’m out several times a day with my dog on the beach, as well as running, cycling and swimming. I’m involved with the local running club here and the local parkrun. So, I like trying to keep active and to have a good work-life balance. I’m very fortunate working at Level that they operate a remote working system, so we’re welcome in the office in Covent Garden when we want to go in but there’s absolutely no issue whatsoever to working from home all the time if that’s what suits you. So, I’m very fortunate to have that set-up and not having to travel into an office every day suits me really well.