The International Cricket Council's insistence on players signingcontracts prohibiting them from any advertising that endorses products of rival companies to the official sponsors of the forthcoming Champions Trophy and World Cup appears to be legally untenable.

This is because ICC is asking one party - the player - to guarantee the conduct of another - the sponsor - who is not a signatory to the contract. So it would be down to the sponsors to adhere to ICC's dictates to the players - or violate them.

Consider the ramifications. A player signs the contract with ICC, stipulating some terms over which he has no control. No player has a contract with a sponsor which gives him the right to decide when and how often that sponsor should advertise a product with the player's endorsement. The sponsor decides - rightly - that he is not in any way obligated by the contract between the player and ICC, and decides to go ahead with his promotion bearing the player's likeness during the tournaments.

ICC would then have no option but to ban the cricketer from playing. He would then have full recourse to legal remedies for damages, preferably in an English court, where justice is not unduly delayed. It would bring the whole game into further disrepute.

The basis of this entirely avoidable imbroglio appears to be greed on the part of ICC and its various national constituents. If the ambush clause hadn't been incorporated, the amount of sponsorship money they would have received would have been considerably reduced. The dispute does not affect the revenue ICC will receive from the broadcast media: it is these extra sponsorship pounds which have created a situation detrimental to the players and the game.

ICC claims that the ambush clause was part of a contract it prepared two years ago. Mr AC Muthiah, who was the Indian Board's president at the time, denies that it was. Even if it had been there, it would have made no sense - because at that time the tournament sponsors weren't known anyway. Were the players expected to put their entire commercial earnings on hold, until ICC tied up its sponsors, to avoid possible conflict?

In all this, nobody seems to be considering the sponsors' rights. The sponsor invests not only in the players' endorsements but equally on creatives - films, print material, promotions and more. After all that, ICC is now expecting them to suspend that advertising for seven months of the year - three months around the Champions Trophy, and four for the World Cup.

ICC and the BCCI talk loosely of compensating the players, but in most cases they have already received their fees from the sponsors. Who will compensate the sponsors? Should it be only for the amount spent on endorsements, or also on creatives and lost opportunities? Most companies have invested in cricket and cricketers this year because they knew the Champions Trophy and the World Cup were coming up. Just because the sponsor happens to be a corporation, and thus rich, does not mean that it has no legal rights or a commercial point of view.

Clearly there has to be a solution to this contentious issue. ICC could request players not to shoot for or endorse any advertisement for individual corporates who rival official sponsors, during the tournaments and the cooling-off period before and after them. This would stop companies from actively indulging in ambush marketing, as happened between two soft-drinks brands in the football World Cup. No-one is suggesting that the rights of the event sponsors, or the events themselves, should be harmed by such unprincipled advertising. If ICC alters the players' contract as I have suggested, they could then renegotiate financial terms with the sponsors of the event.

This would only result in less profit for ICC and its member boards, rather than a loss for the tournaments, whose costs are amply cocered by broadcast fees. It would be fair to all concerned.

The players need to stand their ground, otherwise they will be signing an unenforcable contract, and expose themselves in the process. And ICC, recognising the legal issues, should recognise the legal realities and be more reasonable. Past experience, however, suggests that this might be expecting a little too much from the administrators of the game.

Maneck Davar used to edit Lex et Juris, a law magazine published in Mumbai, and is now publisher of Wisden Asia Cricket.

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