Leicester City and other Premier League clubs have filed £100 million claims against insurers for ‘Covid losses.’
Leicester City, Aston Villa, Arsenal, Liverpool, Tottenham Hotspur, Brighton, West Ham United, and Crystal Palace are requesting bigger payouts under their insurance plans as a result of the virus’s impact on suspended games and matches performed behind closed doors.
The High Court has been informed that Leicester City and seven Premier League football teams are bringing claims against insurers totaling over £100 million for losses allegedly sustained during the Covid-19 outbreak.
Arsenal, Liverpool, Tottenham Hotspur, Brighton & Hove Albion, Aston Villa, West Ham United, and Crystal Palace are requesting bigger payouts under their insurance coverage as a result of the virus’s impact on suspended games and matches performed behind closed doors. Insurers, who have already provided interim payments of £2.5 million to each club, are opposing proposals for larger sums, according to a court, in a dispute over the scope and limits of business interruption insurance contracts.
Leicester, who were demoted to the Championship last season, are also named as defendants in a preliminary legal action filed against insurers Allianz, Aviva, CNA, Liberty Mutual, MS Amlin, and Zurich. On Thursday, a brief preliminary hearing before Mr Justice Jacobs was held in London, ahead of an estimated one to two-week trial at a later date.
The judge revealed that he was an Arsenal season ticket holder, but he did not believe this would influence his ability to hear the case. In written arguments, Andrew Green KC, who represents the football clubs who are bringing their claims through a number of commercial entities, stated that they had “suffered significant losses as a result of decisions taken by the football authorities and government in response to Covid-19 in the UK.”
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He stated that the claims, which were issued in May 2022, were for “loss of revenue” and “costs of continuing to operate” and related to “lost ticket revenue as a result of the suspension of professional football matches or the playing of those matches ‘behind closed doors’.” Mr. Green argued that clubs were also liable for “loss of revenue suffered as a result of government measures restricting non-matchday retail and hospitality, as well as loss of revenue from events at stadiums, eg concerts, not taking place as a result of the UK Government’s ban on mass gatherings” .
According to the lawyer, insurers are incorrect in claiming that the alleged losses should be lumped together under a “single occurrence” of government actions to halt assistance for mass demonstrations on March 16, 2020 or to impose the first lockdown on March 23, 2020. In written submissions, Alistair Schaff KC, representing the insurers, stated that the total value of all claims based on numbers disclosed thus far was £98,666,697.
He explained that each club’s insurance coverage limited claims for “notifiable diseases” to £2.5 million for “any single business interruption loss,” entitling them to a single payment over the March 2020 decisions. However, the clubs have blamed their purported losses on 22 choices made by the Government and football authorities, alleging they are owed several payouts, according to Mr Schaff.
An issue in the case, according to the barrister, was how the clubs’ losses in the 2019/20 and 2020/21 seasons were linked to authorities’ decisions, including whether some later losses were “the causative run-off of the original first wave lockdown cases/measures” or the result of a “second wave” of cases on or around September 9, 2020, when insurance contracts had expired.
Such issues will be the subject of a first-stage trial over the claims, with the question of how much money clubs may be entitled to being reserved for a future trial. The court procedures follow a landmark £1.2 billion judicial dispute over firms’ capacity to claim on insurance for coronavirus-related disruption in 2021.
The UK’s top court “substantially allowed” the Financial Conduct Authority’s appeal in a test case that could affect 370,000 businesses over the wording of business interruption insurance contracts. Some insurers argued that their policies did not cover the Covid-19 outbreak, but the City watchdog said the Supreme Court verdict “decisively removes many of the roadblocks to policyholder claims.”
