Panama Papers: Image rights prove football is the Panama of all Panamas

COMMENT: The murky world of footballers' image rights needs to be clamped down on

Lionel Messi has to appear in court over undeclared image rights (Getty)

Pray for Lionel, my friends. His name is in the Panama Papers and unlike all of those toffs of a certain age whom we now know have been busy offshore, they want to tell us that Messi is the victim.

A company for which he and his father are co-signatories was set up in Panama in 2015, a day after the player was charged with tax irregularities, documents from the Mossack Fonseca cache appear to show. But Leo possessing that stardust quality of his, the global response is not exactly the one which Sigmundur Gunnlaughsson, Gianni Infantino and a bunch of Tories can say they are familiar with. “False and injurious” is what the family claims this disclosure about the ‘Star Enterprises’ shell company to be. And though no one is actually calling it criminal to plough a hefty wad of your £40m annual salary offshore to limit your tax, when the Spanish nation which has nurtured you is experiencing the agony of 22.4 per cent unemployment, Barcelona are not taking a sceptical view, either. The club quickly said it offers “affection and support to the player and his whole family and makes all judicial means at its disposal.” Mas que un club indeed.

The rebuttal is the version of the story which has been washing around the internet for the past 72 hours, with the Messis insisting that the Panama company is “inactive and dormant.” And it could, indeed, be an account that they didn’t bother to get to work on. But what can be said without fear of contradiction, is that there will be another Messi account, registered where the sea laps the shores, into which he deposits a vast stash of cash earned because of the ubiquitous entity called image rights.

How can we be so sure? Because almost every self-respecting top-flight player in every self-respecting league in Europe will have struck an agreement with the club he signs for that a percentage of his wage, typically 15 per cent, will be syphoned off into an account established for image rights. When you are hearing about your club concluding a transfer this summer, be assured that one of the first questions he is being asked will be: “Do you have an entity?” Or: “How would you like us to do the 15 per cent?”

Where does his money go in Spain, I ask my friend who operates in the business of La Liga and knows it extremely well. “Offshore usually,” he says. Nice work for Messi - but nicer work still for those my friend describes as the “less successful” players who you really can’t see enhancing the club’s image all that much but who will still get that cut hived off.

It’s the same here. A nice little slice of protected income. If evidence were really needed that this is a preposterous artificial construct, designed to line the pockets of individuals who increasingly command six figures a week, then it comes in the revelation that Manuel Pellegrini earns image rights.

For the Premier League players, there are actually some grounds for image rights envy. When it emerged in 1999 that Arsenal’s Dennis Bergkamp and David Platt were funnelling 70 per cent of their income into this magic porridge pot, the Premier League began some work to restore financial credibility. A deal with Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs and Premier League clubs now means that a maximum 20 per cent of income can now be designated images rights and that the company which receives it must be British-registered.

So it’s no Panama hats for our boys. Just a plain old London registration for their ‘companies’ which generally employ the sum total of no one, do the sum-total of nothing and are a vehicle to receive the monthly wad in return for services rendered which, for all the world, appear to be part and parcel of why you command £100,000 a week in the first place.

Sit on it: that’s best. If you pay yourself a dividend out of your account, you’ll be taxed on it at 45 per cent. Pay for stuff with it, instead. If you can convince the taxman that a new car or house is a business expense then you can charge that back, reduce your profit and, naturally, claim back the 20 per cent VAT on the outlay.

You’ll incur a sore head if you try to follow the paper trail. Despite Pellegrini’s allegiance to the off-shore delights of Guernsey, Manchester City retained £24.5m of player image rights as an asset, which they said they had sold three years ago to an external company. That created a lump sum income which helped them limit their losses at a time when they were set to default on Uefa’s Financial Fair Play regime. It has never been discovered who that external company is, though City said at the time it was not one of their affiliate firms. City, pride of East Manchester, are registered in Abu Dhabi. Manchester United, pride of Stretford, are registered in the Cayman Islands.

Messi will not have an entirely easy ride in Spain. Real Madrid’s political power and influence makes sure of it. He has to appear in court two days after the Champions League final for 4m euros undeclared image rights from 2007-09. But you wonder if a day might come when he will see the light in the stories of the Agencia Tributaria tax agency’s feared los revisores circulating impoverished Andalucia and Catalunia in search of tax avoidance among the Godforsaken; or when the Premier League’s Englishmen will experience the same as they witness the Tory Government’s quest to take from those who cannot even shower without assistance. Maybe then we will see a player declare: ‘to hell with this nonsense.’ Until that day, football will remain the Panama of all Panamas.

Aching sadness to the very end of the Hillsborough inquests

To the very end, there was an aching sadness about the Hillsborough Inquests. The coroner was concluding his summing up on Tuesday when he reminded the jury of their duty to decide whether video footage of 22-year-old David Birtle, taken amid the very worst of the horror at 3.07pm on April 25, 1989, had shown that he was dead at that moment. They played the footage and there, indeed, was David, just about discernible; his face tiny at the bottom of the screen and the base of the crush as others above him struggled to get over the pen and free. The video may have shown his head moving the coroner, observed. But that movement may have been due to “a loss of muscle tone” because life had already passed out of him, he added. Someone in the public gallery caught her breath, in that moment. Two years of evidence. Such infinite sorrows.