The company which hosts the Professional Footballers’ Association website, Givemefootball.com, has been forced to cough up nearly £400,000 – including £53,000 in damages – after the High Court ruled it had effectively lied about the size of its customer database to secure a lucrative sponsorship deal.
The case centres on a deal between the site, owned by Sports New Media, and a company called Playup Interactive Entertainment.
Playup had signed a sponsorship agreement with Givemefootball to sponsor the PFA Fans Awards. The agreement detailed that, in return for its sponsorship, Givemefootball would send out “targeted” Playup marketing material via emails and text messages to a given number of Givemefootball “opted-in recipients”.
The agreement contained a guarantee from Givemefootball that any recipients of the marketing communications had all given prior consent to receiving the material.
But it transpired that Givemefootball did not have enough opted in names to satisfy the deal so supplemented this number with a “bought-in” list from another company.
After finding out what the company had done, Playup terminated the contract and sued for breach of contract. Givemefootball denied the breach and counter-claimed that Playup should have to pay up the sponsorship money it had not already paid.
Givemefootball claimed that those on the bought-in database had given their consent because they had agreed to receive direct marketing from the company it had licensed the data from. The judge disagreed.
Mr Justice Williams ruled: “I conclude that Givemefootball failed to perform its obligations in relation to the data programme rights, that PlayUp was entitled to terminate the Sponsorship Agreement, that PlayUp is entitled to payment of £340,251.14 plus VAT under [the terms] of the Sponsorship Agreement, and that PlayUp is entitled to damages in the amount of £53,000.”
