Both, and confusing the two is the most common error. A baseline grant of image rights sits inside the standard playing contract and applies automatically. Anything beyond that baseline — the arrangements that produce headline percentages and image rights companies — is a separate agreement, negotiated separately, usually only for players with genuine commercial profile. Most young players will only ever encounter the first.

Yes. In the Premier League standard contract, clause 4 grants the club rights to use the player's image for the promotional, community and public relations activities of the club, its commercial partners, the League and the League's main sponsors (LawInSport). No separate negotiation is required for this. Every player signing that contract grants it, which is why knowing its limits matters more than negotiating it.

A genuinely useful protection that many agents miss. Clause 4.6.1 of the Premier League contract in the 2022/23 Handbook provides that the club's use of the player's image "shall be limited to no greater usage than the average for all players regularly in the club's first team" (Daniel Geey). With roughly twenty regular first-teamers, no individual can be used significantly more than the squad average. The player is protected from becoming the club's default marketing face for nothing.

The club or its lawyers usually draft it, and it is negotiated alongside the playing contract rather than after it. That sequencing matters. Once the playing contract is agreed and the player is committed, leverage on the image rights agreement collapses. If a separate agreement is in contemplation, its key terms belong in the same conversation as salary.

Clause 4.11 of the Premier League contract states that nothing in clause 4 prevents the club entering into additional, supplemental or variant arrangements with the player, or with all or some of the club's players. That clause is the doorway. It confirms the standard grant is a floor rather than a ceiling, and that bespoke image rights agreements sit on top of it rather than replacing it.

Four. Does the club intend to rely on the standard contract alone, or propose a separate image rights agreement? If separate, what specific uses does it want beyond the standard grant? What is it offering to pay for them, and how was that figure arrived at? And does the club actually have the capability to exploit what it is asking for? That last question is not rhetorical — see Q70 in Part 3.

The publicly visible ones are the standard league contracts, and they are worth reading in full rather than in summary. Bespoke agreements rarely surface except through litigation and leaks. What the tribunal record shows is that the drafting which fails is drafting that recites a payment without evidencing a commercial rationale for it — a point Hull City AFC (Tigers) Ltd v HMRC made expensive, and which Part 3 covers.

A precise definition of the rights granted; the specific territories and media covered; the term, and whether it matches the playing contract; the consideration and how it was calculated; what happens on transfer, termination or retirement; the player's appearance and cooperation obligations expressed as countable numbers; carve-outs for the player's existing personal deals; and conflict provisions for competing sponsors. If the consideration is stated without a calculation, that is a defect, not a simplification.

More aggressive in scope, more cautious in structure. Clubs increasingly want broad digital and social media rights that did not exist in older contracts. At the same time, sustained HMRC enforcement — and legislation taking effect in April 2027 — has made clubs warier of aggressive tax structuring. Expect a club to ask for more rights while offering less structural creativity in how it pays for them.

By signing the standard contract the player agrees to participate in the club's promotional, community and public relations activities, and those of its commercial partners and the League's sponsors. This is participation, not merely permission: the player must turn up and cooperate. Agents who treat image rights as purely a payment question miss that the player is also agreeing to spend time.

This is negotiated rather than fixed, and it is where a countable number protects your client. The Bryan Robson Ltd v HMRC case turned partly on an agreement requiring a minimum of 35 personal appearances per six-month period (ICAS). That is an ambassadorial arrangement rather than a playing contract, but it illustrates the point: obligations should be expressed as a specific number, with a defined counting method.

Press conferences, post-match interviews, club media content and matchday content are ordinarily part of a player's duties. These are rarely separately priced and rarely negotiable at the lower end of the market. Their significance for image rights is definitional: the more the club can characterise as ordinary media duty, the less sits inside a separately paid image rights arrangement.

Increasingly specific ones: minimum posting frequency, obligations to tag or feature club sponsors, and content approval rights. This is the fastest-moving area of image rights drafting, because a player's own channel is an asset the club did not historically control. Read these clauses closely — they can require a player to publish commercial content on a channel the player built personally.

Within the scope of what the contract grants, generally yes — subject to the usage cap in Q28. What a player can push back on is a campaign that exceeds the granted scope, that implies personal endorsement beyond permitted promotional use, or that conflicts with the player's own commercial agreements. The answer therefore depends entirely on how tightly the grant was drafted.

Only what the contract lets them refuse, which is why carve-outs must be negotiated in advance rather than asserted later. Gambling, alcohol, certain financial products and food categories are the usual candidates. A player with a religious or personal objection to a category needs that objection written into the agreement at signature. Raising it when the campaign is scheduled is a breach conversation, not a negotiation.

Whatever the agreement does not take away — which makes the carve-out clause critical. A well-drafted agreement preserves the player's freedom to conclude personal endorsements, subject only to genuine conflict with club sponsors. A poorly drafted one gives the club approval rights over the player's own deals. For a young player with no current endorsements, this clause looks irrelevant and becomes the most valuable thing you preserved.

The contract decides, and usually in the club's favour within its own domain. The recurring flashpoints are boot deals against club kit suppliers, and competing category sponsors — a player's personal deal with one airline or betting brand against the club's deal with another. The practical resolution is usually territorial: the club sponsor prevails in club contexts, the player's sponsor elsewhere, with matchday carve-outs specified.

They operate in parallel and can genuinely conflict. National associations acquire their own collective rights over players in the international setup, and those obligations are not subordinate to the club's. A player can be contractually required to promote one sponsor for a club and a competing one for a national team. Neither agreement typically resolves this, which is why players with significant personal deals need conflict provisions drafted with the international calendar in mind.

The player, unless they have agreed otherwise — and increasingly clubs are asking them to agree otherwise. Where a club has contributed to building a following, it may seek approval rights or continuing use. The question that matters at transfer is what happens to that following: the account travels with the player, but any obligation to feature the former club's sponsors should end cleanly on departure. Say so expressly.

This is the most under-negotiated point in the entire subject. A club paying for image rights it never exploits has both short-changed the player commercially and created a serious tax problem for itself — exactly the failure in Hull City, where the club had no ability to exploit the rights and never tried. An obligation on the club to actually use and promote the rights protects the player and strengthens the arrangement's defensibility.

They are contractual, so they follow the agreement: fines under the club's disciplinary code, withholding of payments due under the image rights agreement, and in serious or repeated cases termination. Because these obligations often sit in a separate document from the playing contract, breach can trigger consequences under one without automatically affecting the other. Check how the two documents cross-reference.

In almost every real negotiation, image rights money is part of the same total package, not additional to it. A club works out what it will spend on a player and then decides how to split it between salary and image rights payments. Agents who treat an image rights offer as extra money on top of the salary they have already negotiated are usually mistaken — and should confirm which it is explicitly.

It depends entirely on drafting, and the two are very different products. A fixed periodic payment for a licence is effectively guaranteed. A payment contingent on the club actually running campaigns, or on a share of merchandise revenue, may deliver nothing. For a player whose salary has been reduced to accommodate an image rights component, contingency transfers real risk from club to player.

Bonuses are ordinarily calculated on the playing contract's remuneration, so income routed through an image rights agreement typically falls outside the bonus calculation base. That is easy to overlook and can be expensive. If a player's package is split, check whether appearance, goal, promotion and loyalty bonuses are computed on basic salary alone — and if so, whether the split has quietly reduced their value.

Generally yes. Modern squad cost and profitability rules are designed to capture the total cost of a player to a club, which is precisely why routing money through a separate agreement does not remove it from the calculation. Agents sometimes assume an image rights payment sits outside a club's regulatory limits. Do not build a negotiating strategy on that assumption without confirming the specific competition's rules.