Devastating defeat for Cardiff City/Vincent Tan in the French courts.

One Response to Devastating defeat for Cardiff City/Vincent Tan in the French courts.

1. Dai Woosnam says:

   April 2, 2026 at 10:54 am

   Outstanding summary from you Paul, on a matter that you rightly say is mightily complicated. Legal brains opining on this can come into a revolving door behind us, and come out in front of us.
   My thoughts? Well… like you I was not surprised the French commercial courts threw out the case. The way I felt was not that the French would would automatically favour their own (FC Nantes) against ‘perfidious Albion’… but that they would look at the history of this dispute, and see that UEFA’s highest authority plus The Court for Arbitration for Sport had decided in favour of the French team… so what chance did we have of expecting a different outcome in France itself? Somewhere between none and zero?
   And at the back of my mind I cannot help but feel that although none of these authorities who were passing judgement on the case, were particularly interested in knowing the minutiae of our playing staff, news must have got to them that Willie McKay the alleged true villain of the case who has scandalously got away scot-free (pun unintentional)… had somehow got his buddy Neil to somehow take two of his sons on to our playing staff.
   We shipped them out soon after the tragedy occurred, but methinks the damage to our future case was already done. (I mean to say, the optics were terrible… there is Cardiff City claiming this abrasive Scot was acting for Nantes and not them… yet he has had his two sons who are – almost by universal consent –underwhelming footballers, taken on by his friend Neil… who happens to be our manager…!!)
   And we will leave aside the wider aspects of this dreadful affair… the fact that McKay clearly overstated the interest of two other EPL clubs in order to drive up the fee to an absurd £15m… double the fee what a player should have commanded when he was having his first decent season of his five in Ligue 1.
   But it was par for the course with Neil… of the £82m he spent, I reckon only one player was true value for money… the wonderful Lee Tomlin. Yes you can point to Josh Murphy and Bobby de Cordova (the brother of the blind MP)… but when they were at Cardiff the former never really produced and eventually left for no fee, and the latter also was anonymous… but fortunately we saved face in his case by getting the fee back from Fulham.
   Why did Neil consistently overpay? Well, that is not for me to answer. But the Sala transfer was one of the most blatant cases.

   TTFN,
   Dai.