Every reasonably well set up contract sets up obligations for each signing party, plus compensations/damage to be paid in case one of the parties doesn’t do its job.

Usually, like in any commercial contract, one party has to pay compensation/damage proportional to what it stands to earn. For instance, when two companies make a contract for a project, delivering the project late is taxed as a percentage of the project’s value per day or week or month.

So probably there are clauses in Mutu’s contract regarding compensation for failing to fulfill his contract, as percentages of the salary he was going to earn – possibly the whole sallary and then some. But it’s unlikely that there are clauses in the contract relating what he owes the club in case of breach of contract to the transfer fee. In which case, IMO, there’s no chance Chelsea will be able to justify asking for the whole transfer fee in a civil court. After all, they were as responsible when they signed the contract as Mutu was when he signed it. It is not that Mutu didn’t have an influence on this fee, it is that it is highly unusual and unlikely that a contract contains clauses that make you pay compensation for fees you can’t influence and which you don’t at all receive. In commercial contracts between companies, when there is a risk which you, as a supplier, cannot take, but the customer doesn’t want to carry, an insurance company is involved, the contract’s value is increased by the insurance fees, and the insurance company gets some controlling authority in the project. Which I doubt was the case in Mutu’s contract with Chelsea.

One other thing that makes me believe Mutu has quite a chance in a civil court is that the CAS has lately issued quite some funny rulings, which were appealed and then overturned. So it is possible that they ruled not based on hard facts (i.e. the contract), but on hot air issued by either Chelsea or Mutu, as they did in previous cases.

However, afaik nobody has seen the contract yet, so all we can do is make assumptions. Should the contact say that Mutu has to pay back the transfer fee in case of breach of contract, he’s screwed, whether any of us likes it or not, and in spite of his spectacular recovery from drug use.

However, the court’s statement just compounds my reasons for taking such a dislike to the case brought against him.

We shall see what the Swiss Federal Court make of the matter in due course.

It doesn’t really matter whether he had influence over it. What he did have influence over was upholding his end of the contract, which he did not do. The innocent party (Chelsea) relied on his promised performance, and incurred costs in doing so. Normally these costs are be amortised over the course of the contract, but Mutu’s breach robbed Chelsea of the ability to do that, and that loss was forseeable even if the extent of the loss wasn’t.

to quote the court: “…the fact that the Player was not party to the Transfer Contract and had therefore not determined the amount of the transfer fee, or the other expenses incurred by the Club in connection with the acquisition of the Player (on which compensation is calculated), is entirely irrelevant.”

They had to write off that asset upon sacking the player – the value that they wrote off was to the amount of the striker’s transfer value (which would have obviously been based on the price they paid for him when he arrived from Parma).

In Mutu’s appeal he claimed that the majority of the compensation bill he is facing is based on a value that he has no control over.

Which is a valid point – he is paying back an amount that has been calculated by the amount the club paid for him, which he had no influence over.

And as you will remember Chelsea, at the time, were paying ‘over the odds’ for players due to their riches.

Chelsea could have chosen not to sack him and tried to sell him to another club. The fee they received for him would only go towards paying setting-off the non-amortised portion of the transfer fee paid to acquire him.