Manchester City Football Club Limited v. Vincent Peeris / Renown SC – WIPO Case No. D2009-0686
While rummaging through the Com Laude domain name dispute vault – a collection now large enough to require its own (very geeky, very niche) librarian – I unearthed a curious case from 2009. This one has all the hallmarks of fiction – except for the inconvenient fact that it actually happened.
We acted for Manchester City Football Club, just after the Sheikh Mansour era had begun and the club’s fortunes were turning as sky blue as its kits. The dispute centred on two domains: <manchestercityfc.com> and <mcfc.com>. The former is pretty self-explanatory. The latter, the Respondent claimed, stood not for Manchester City FC – despite decades of use and the club’s international fan base – but for something altogether more local: the “Mutwal Community Football Club” of Colombo, Sri Lanka.
According to the Respondent, this club was formed in the wake of the 2004 tsunami, with entirely honourable intentions and a catchy acronym. He produced minutes from a 2005 meeting, a local certificate, and even a rudimentary website layout. One document claimed a budget for the website of $36,815 – roughly twice the budget he’d allocated to the entire club. Curiously generous, for an organisation which later claimed it was on the brink of bankruptcy.
More curious still, the domain <manchestercityfc.com> had been bought “to give away for free” in a deal involving <mcfc.com>. The latter had allegedly been purchased for $20,000. The Respondent then emailed our client offering both names for sale for £175,000. When that didn’t elicit a response, the price went up. By March 2009, he was suggesting there were third-party offers in the region of £3 million (of course there were…), and that our client ought to match them. Generous flexibility followed – he’d accept £2 million, if the club moved quickly.
In parallel, the Respondent had parked <mcfc.com> with Sedo, where it displayed links such as “Manchester City Football”, “Top Man City Gifts” and “Man City Stadium Tours”. A sincere tribute to community football outreach.
We pointed out the minor flaw in this story – namely, that there was no trace of the alleged MCFC project anywhere. No press coverage, no online footprint, no evidence of any actual use of the acronym before the domains were acquired. And oddly, in the lengthy business proposals sent to City in 2008 and 2009, the Respondent made no mention of the “Mutwal Community Football Club” at all. Just lots of talk of financial difficulty, and the need to cash in on a valuable domain asset.
The Panel wasn’t convinced. Nor, I suspect, would you be. In a detailed decision, the Panel concluded that the whole set-up bore the hallmarks of a sophisticated cybersquatting operation. The Panel politely acknowledged the social good that might have been done by the local community group, but drew a firm line between that and the conduct of the Respondent, who had acquired the domain names not to support a tsunami recovery football project, but to sell them to our client for a hefty profit.
Both domain names were ordered to be transferred to the Complainant. The club, presumably, was relieved to pay £0 instead of £2 million. And the rest of us were left with another cautionary tale about domain name speculation, fictional football teams, and the dangers of overestimating your leverage against a Premier League brand.
At Com Laude, we’ve spent over two decades helping clients untangle domain name disputes – whether the respondent claims to be a rival business, an anonymous fan, or a tsunami-themed grassroots initiative.