El Zamalek Sporting Club v. Ferjani Sassi & Al Duhail SC

Ferjani Sassi and Zamalek signed an employment agreement on 29 July 2018. The dispute that reached CAS combined several distinct threads: Zamalek had deducted amounts from Sassi’s pay that it attributed to tax and to internal disciplinary fines, and had also invoked a unilateral pay variation during the COVID-19 period. Sassi disputed all of it, sent a default notice in May 2021, and ultimately declared his contract expired and moved to Qatari club Al Duhail on 31 May 2021. FIFA’s DRC ruled on 9 December 2021, rejecting Zamalek’s counterclaim as inadmissible and awarding Sassi his outstanding remuneration; Zamalek appealed to CAS.

The panel worked through three separate questions, each with a different answer. On the tax deduction, it held that where a contract specifies an agreed net salary figure, the club bears responsibility for any tax owed on it — the club cannot reduce a net-pay figure by deducting tax from it, since ‘net’ was the whole point of the term. On the disciplinary fines, the panel drew a real distinction: a club can lawfully deduct a fine that its own member association imposed through its own disciplinary process, but it cannot deduct a fine from the club’s own internal disciplinary proceedings unless that process gave the player genuine due process — a fair hearing before the fine was imposed.

On the COVID-19 pay variation, the panel set out what it called a strict, cumulative test: unilateral wage reductions tied to the pandemic are permissible only as a genuine last resort, and only where the club can show it met every one of several conditions together, not just some of them. Zamalek had not met that bar. Taken together, the panel found substantially for Sassi on each point, partially upheld the appeal only to adjust the compensation figure, and split costs 90% to Zamalek and 10% to the player — reflecting how comprehensively the club had lost on the substance despite a technical partial-upheld classification.