If this does pan out the way it appears it will, then I think the club are going to have to be pragmatic and look at these judgements as a (very expensive) guide to the contract with SDI.
SDI are using the terms for their benefit, but now we know how it works perhaps the club can too.
From the Oct 2018 judgment the material terms are:
1. The payment by the 3rd party to RFC
2. The share of revenue between RFC and the 3rd party; and
3. The duration
(It’s more complicated than that since these are split between the various types of right, but this is the basic position.)
I think RFC should be inviting offers for deals which front load the arrangement and are of short duration - no more than a year.
By front load I mean a high initial upfront payment by the 3rd party in exchange for the 3rd party getting a high share of the retail proceeds from actual sales.
If Elite (say) offer £5m (or whatever) upfront as their payment in exchange for (say) 90% of the sale proceeds for a year (the figures don’t matter very much for present purposes.)
Either SDI match, in which case they have to pay us the same dosh up front, and we just don’t buy the strips for a year, making sure they make a loss on the deal.
If SDI don’t match, then I’m sure we would show our gratitude to the 3rd party such as Elite for breaking SDI’s hold by giving them bumper sales.
If SDI continue to match year on year on this basis we just keep taking their money without giving them any back by buying strips.
Indeed even if we don’t get any further offers from other 3rd parties, the terms going forward have been amended to this upfront arrangement meaning this arrangement is the default annual roll over deal.
Sooner or later fat boy (or his shareholders) gets fed up, I would imagine. Meantime rather than leaving us with a rolling £1m damages payment to him for every contract, he has a rolling upfront annual payment of (Say) £5m for no benefit.
The position won’t be as simple as that, so it’s an example of what we could try rather than the actual solution, but something along those lines could start turning the contract to our benefit.