The most dangerous clause I’ve ever found in a contract.

I was closing a Premiership deal for a player when I found a single line, buried deep in the sub-clauses of a side document, that could have terminated his entire contract.

Here's the background. Premiership playing contracts are standardised. Around 40 pages of wording, identical for every player, pre-agreed between the players' union and the clubs. The individual terms sit in their own schedule: salary, bonuses, relocation allowance. The bulk of the document is pre-approved structure, and it's fairly safe.

The termination clause is the strictest protection in the document. To end a player's contract, the club needs a gross material breach, and even then the player has a time period to remedy it. People spent a long time negotiating that protection for players.

On this deal, I had placed 15% of the total value into an image rights contract sitting alongside the playing contract. Standard structure for a marketable player.

Except the image rights contract enjoys none of that union protection. Nobody pre-agreed its wording. It's easier to terminate, and in this case the trigger was anything that brings the club into disrepute. That judgement is entirely subjective, and the club makes it. Gesture back at a fan who has been harassing you during a game, and the club could call it disrepute if it suited them.

On its own, that's a concern worth negotiating. Then I found one line buried deep in the sub-clauses:

If the club terminates your image rights contract, we retain the right to terminate your playing contract.

Think about what they'd done there. A side agreement worth just over a tenth of the deal carried the power to end a multi-year Premiership contract, through a loosely worded clause sitting outside every protection the union had built.

Contracts are written by lawyers with an agenda. They're not impartial documents, and that clause wasn't an accident. This one was very sneaky, and the way it was designed to circumvent the playing contract was, in my opinion, borderline immoral.

We caught it, and it was removed. Without that, my player could have lost a multi-year Premiership contract over a judgement as vague as disrepute.

And, to be honest, he arguably brought the club into disrepute once or twice across his five years there. Small things such as a red card, etc., but when the club is the judge, jury and executioner via this clause, we would have forgone our power to argue.

Had that clause survived, either moment could have handed the club the whole contract.

The playing contract protected him from everything except the document sitting next to it.