THE month-long celebration of “the beautiful game” is all but upon us. Predictions of success, glory or indifference, or of a player having a Roy Keane moment, are hostages to fortune, but one thing is certain. Without an extraordinary amount of unsung and, at times, rather abstruse legal work, the Fifa World Cup would not be taking place.

Events of the stature of Germany 2006 are inconceivable in the absence of lawyers. There will be those who object to this statement, people who believe that it is businessmen and marketeers who bring about leading sporting festivals. Others prefer to ignore the lawyers and focus simply on the package of slickly delivered football, as if the players were all playing the game for sheer love, wholly free of the interplay of commerce and the law that is the lifeblood of modern football. The truth, though, is rather different, and nowhere is this better illustrated than in the delicate matter of sponsorship.

There are 15 sponsors, ranging from Yahoo!, Budweiser and McDonald’s to Gillette, Toshiba and Philips. All have paid a substantial amount for the right to be described as an “Official Partner” of the 2006 Fifa World Cup. There are a further six national suppliers, including Postbank, ODDSET and Deutsche Bahn, who are reported to have paid €13 million (£9 million) for the right to use Fifa logos and trademarks in their advertising. Despite demand for tickets that exceeds supply, it is from these sponsorship deals (along with sales of the television rights) that Fifa will make most of its money. Indeed, the value of agreements with its various sponsors is estimated at €700 million.

No sponsor would agree to pay Fifa’s fees if its exclusivity was not guaranteed. Step forward Fifa’s legal advisers. Contracts taking account of every eventuality will have been drafted to safeguard Fifa’s position. By way of example, it entered into an agreement with Hamburger Sportverein (HSV) for the use of its stadium in Hamburg. HSV has its own sponsor, AOL, and its stadium is usually known as the “AOL Arena Stadium”. Not for the next few weeks, however. Now it is the “Fifa World Cup Stadium Hamburg”, a reincarnation that Yahoo! will have noted with pleasure, at the same time as expecting the temporary change in naming rights to have been enshrined in a legal agreement.

Fifa also had to be mindful of the feelings of its official sponsor of non-alcoholic drinks, Coca-Cola. There are 12 official fan festivals in the host cities, but the deal with Coca-Cola means that supply of virtually every other drink — save for tap water — would be a problem. Indeed, even the supply of milk became a sticking point, until Coca-Cola reportedly agreed to allow the supply of “non-flavoured milk beverages”.

Max Duthie, a sports lawyer with Hammonds, says that brand protection is integral to the organisation of Germany 2006. “Lawyers have been intimately involved in devising strategies and drafting legal agreements to prevent ambush marketing,” he says. “Fifa will have been liaising, too, with local authorities and the police in order to prevent, as a hypothetical example, Pepsi turning up before a game and handing out thousands of Pepsi T-shirts to fans, so that, once inside, sections of the ground could appear devoted to Pepsi.” Duthie adds that at sports events in the UK trading standards officers will often work with event organisers to combat counterfeit merchandising and intellectual property infringement. “I expect the situation will be the same in Germany,” he says.

Indeed, Fifa’s efforts to persuade local authorities to help them to clamp down on trademark infringement have already drawn some criticism in Germany. As Jürgen Kießling, World Cup co-ordinator for the city of Berlin, told Der Spiegel earlier this year: “Trademark protection hasn’t exactly been the responsibility of public authorities in the past.” Fifa apparently also sent to German customs officials a list of licensed manufacturers and samples of their products, presumably in the hope that they, too, will help to curtail any breach of Fifa’s rights.

If anything, though, such toil is merely the tip of the iceberg. Duthie reels off a list of other legal issues almost as frightening as Ronaldinho in full flight: “Ticketing conditions will have been carefully drafted, to prevent touting, which is an increasing concern in modern football given the public order implications. As well as constant monitoring of potential intellectual property infringement, player disciplinary matters and anti-doping regulations mean that lawyers cannot stop work once the contest has started.”

Nick White, a sports lawyer with Couchman Harrington, agrees: “We receive numerous queries from businesses who want to check that their campaigns do not infringe Fifa’s intellectual property. Like many rights-holders in modern sport, Fifa protect their rights aggressively, so anyone thinking of exploiting the buzz around the World Cup for advertising purposes has to be very careful.”

The inter-relationship between sponsors, rights-holders, teams, players and spectators has never been more complex — and never more intertwined with the law. Indeed, only weeks before the tournament kicks off, Crystal Palace chairman Simon Jordan was once again rattling cages with his legal action against his former employee Iain Dowie. That a football chairman should so readily rely upon the nuances of post-employment restraint law would have been unimaginable just a decade ago.

What is very clear, though, is that “the beautiful game” seems worlds away from the days of former QPR and England striker Stan Bowles, who, in the mid-1970s, once signed deals with both Gola and adidas to wear their boots in an England international. Bowles solved the conundrum by wearing one boot on each foot. Nowadays, the lawyers would be ahead of even quick-thinking “Stan the Man”.

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