Image rights are the quiet half of every contract

A headline salary figure often conceals a second agreement covering a player's face, and the split is not incidental.

Two documents, one signature ceremony. The playing contract everybody reports on, and an image rights agreement that usually is not reported at all, often held by a separate company, sometimes in a separate country.

The structure exists for defensible reasons before it exists for questionable ones. A club selling shirts with a name on the back is commercialising a person, and that person has a legal interest in the commercialisation. Splitting it out lets both sides price the two things separately: the labour, and the licence to use the likeness. Endorsement income a player brings from outside the club stays outside it.

Then tax enters. Employment income is taxed one way and licensing income another, and in several jurisdictions the difference is substantial. Revenue authorities have spent years arguing that a large share of what clubs call image rights is really wages wearing a costume, and they have often won. The line is genuinely blurry. A globally famous player has real independent commercial value. A promising squad player probably does not, and an image rights payment to him is harder to justify with a straight face.

For the sport, the consequence is opacity. Published wage bills are not comparable between clubs because different organisations push different proportions through the licensing side. Spending controls that measure wages therefore measure something inconsistent. Any regulation that relies on a salary figure is regulating an accounting choice.

There is a player-side risk too, and it gets less attention than it should. When the image company sits with an agency or a third party rather than the athlete, the athlete may have signed away long-term control of his own name for a short-term uplift he did not fully price. Young players do this routinely. Some spend the rest of their careers buying it back.

My position: image rights arrangements should be filed with the competition organiser and counted in full towards any spending cap, whatever their tax treatment. Let the revenue authorities argue about tax; the sporting regulator should simply refuse to notice the distinction.

Otherwise the cap measures paperwork, and the clubs with the best advisers win a competition nobody entered.