Image Rights: The Persona as a Tax Structure

The concept: the persona as a legal object and as a tax object

"Image rights" is the working name for a bundle of ways to earn from being recognisable: name, face, voice, signature, silhouette, mannerisms, association with a product. Almost nowhere is this a single legal right. In Sports Club plc the Special Commissioners recorded that "there is no property right in the image of a person in England", and found the very term "image rights agreement" inaccurate, renaming the disputed contracts "promotional agreements" (EIM00734). In Russia the use of a citizen's likeness is protected by art. 152.1 of the Civil Code as a personal non-property right: consent is required, but there is no transferable registrable asset. The only jurisdiction that has turned the persona into registered property is Guernsey.

The whole tax structure grows out of that mismatch: a fee for the "image" is routed out of employment-income rates into a company, and revenue authorities push it back into salary. The pattern travels — the same argument surfaces wherever a highly paid individual with a recognisable face is paid partly through a licensing vehicle, from footballers to streamers.

Spain: article 92 LIRPF and the 85/15 rule

Spain is the only country in Europe to have written a dedicated income-attribution rule against image companies: art. 92 of Ley 35/2006 del IRPF. Attribution bites only where three circumstances coincide (para. 1): the individual has assigned the right to exploit their image, or authorised its use, to another person — resident or non-resident, and it makes no difference whether this happened before or after Spanish residence was acquired; the individual renders services under an employment relationship; and that employer, or a person related to it, has acquired the right to exploit the same individual's image under arrangements with third parties.

The 85/15 rule is an exception from attribution, not a permitted ceiling. Paragraph 2 frames it negatively: there is no attribution if the individual's employment income for the period is at least 85% of the sum of "employment income plus the full consideration paid by the employer for the image". In other words the image payment must fit within 15% — otherwise the mechanism in para. 3 switches on: the individual's base absorbs the consideration the employer pays to the holder of the image, grossed up by the ingreso a cuenta and reduced by what the individual actually received from the first assignee. Paragraph 4 gives credit for the assignee's taxes in Spain and abroad, but bars credit for taxes paid in jurisdictions on the Spanish list of tax havens; paragraph 7 preserves the primacy of treaties.

The surrounding arithmetic: income from assigning image rights is rendimiento del capital mobiliario under art. 25.4.d) LIRPF where the assignment falls outside a business activity; the withholding rate under art. 101.10 LIRPF is 24%, and the ingreso a cuenta in the art. 92.8 case is 19%. Image income caught by art. 92 is at the same time carved out of the CFC rules in art. 91 LIRPF: the same amount is attributed once only.

The Spanish conveyor: convictions and settlements

Spain is the only country where the image-rights question has produced a run of criminal cases against household names.

The Messi case is the founding precedent: the Second Chamber of the Supreme Court upheld three counts under art. 305 for 2007–2009 and went out of its way to ask why the player's tax advisers had been left out of the indictment.

The Ancelotti case is instructive for a different reason. The coach told the court that when he signed his federative contract with Real Madrid in July 2013 he agreed to take 15% of his remuneration through image rights via an assignee company — the structure was built precisely along the 85/15 line. That did not save him. The judgment finds that the defendant's conduct "reveals a clear understanding of the tax obligation flowing from his tax residence in Spain in 2014, and a conscious will to evade tax on income from the exploitation of image rights through artificial mechanisms of corporate structuring", and that professional advice "does not exclude intent where the conduct is plainly fraudulent and the structures answer to no real economic logic" (account of the judgment).

On 2015 he was acquitted: he moved to London mid-year and held no Spanish residence — the entire construction hangs on Spanish tax residence, not on the image contract.

The Shakira case is often filed alongside the football ones, but it is a different story: the six counts concerned IRPF and wealth tax, and the contested question was Spanish residence itself in 2012–2014 — the offshore companies holding image income were a consequence, not the subject matter of art. 92.

Xabi Alonso: where the scheme ends and a genuine dispute begins

The one high-profile acquittal is dissected in the Supreme Court's press release and is valuable because the chamber disagreed with the reasoning below yet could not overturn an acquittal on appeal. Two propositions stand out. First: "issuing invoices does not of itself cure the commercial activity of a company created for the purpose of evasion. It is the corporate and functional structure, not invoicing activity, that makes a legal person the subject of genuine commercial activity." Second: geographical delocalisation of the company — "however much support it finds in the micro-literalism of art. 92 of Ley 35/2006" — read together with the absence of any employees in that firm, is a marker of evasion.

At the same time the chamber drew a line worth using. Atypical are cases that turn "not on proof of a will to evade, but on a legal dispute between the tax authority and a taxpayer who considers that the rules in force permit a more favourable characterisation". If the income is declared and the argument is about how much, there is no offence under art. 305.

The United Kingdom: HMRC tests commercial reality, not paperwork

England has neither a register nor an equivalent of art. 92 — it has a substance test. The starting point is Sports Club plc (on 1995 facts), where payments to two players' companies were accepted as consideration for a real set of contractual obligations: positive ones (shoots, product endorsement) and negative ones (not doing the same for others).

The second point is Hull City AFC (Tigers) Limited v HMRC [2019] UKFTT 227 (TC), decided on 22 March 2019, where the club paid a player's personal service company around 25% of his employment income for "non-English" image rights. The tribunal dismissed the club's appeal and recharacterised the payments as wages, with PAYE and NIC consequences.

The procedural point matters: HMRC need not prove the contract is a sham; the burden of showing that the substance of the payment is image, not reward for playing, sits with the payer.

Paragraph 128 of the decision lists what was missing, and it now works in practice as the checklist HMRC applies to mid-tier players: the club had no clear intention or plan to exploit the player's overseas rights commercially, no explanation of how the figure was calculated, no valuation or opinion on the worth of the image; it had neither the resources nor any real interest in exploitation; and the rights were never exploited at all. In EIM00738 HMRC says so plainly: reliance on Sports Club no longer works automatically, because club commercial departments have professionalised in the intervening years and are expected to show demonstrable commercial logic.

Since Hull City the case law has thickened, and it has moved beyond football. In Collingwood v HMRC [2025] UKFTT 1065 (TC) of 28 August 2025 the tribunal dismissed the appeal of a former England cricketer: an agreement of 21 January 2005 assigning publicity rights to his own company failed because the sponsorship contracts themselves were concluded with him personally, so the income fell to be taxed as the profits of his self-employment under ITTOIA 2005; the closure notices assessed £196,187.

In HMRC v Bryan Robson Limited [2025] UKUT 406 (TCC) the dispute concerned payments to a personal company under an ambassadorial agreement with Manchester United: on 20 January 2025 the First-tier Tribunal applied the intermediaries legislation while treating part of the consideration as referable to image rights, and HMRC successfully challenged precisely that apportionment in the Upper Tribunal. The IR35 analysis for personal companies is taken separately in the note on PSCs and IR35 for public figures.

The enquiry statistics explain the density of the case law. UHY Hacker Young reports that in 2019/20 HMRC had open cases on 246 footballers, 55 agents and 25 clubs and recovered £73.1m of additional tax against £35.3m the year before; in the year to 31 March 2024 the figure was £67.5m across 83 players, 21 agents and 20 clubs, and more than £384m over five years. The next step is legislative: the Overview of Tax Legislation and Rates published with Budget 2025 records at paragraph 2.10 that legislation in a future Finance Bill will treat all image rights payments related to an employment as taxable employment income, subject to income tax and national insurance contributions, with effect from April 2027; the deadline itself, and what it costs a club player as against a visiting performer, are worked through in the note on athlete taxation in the UK.

Withholding is a separate layer. Under EIM00736 the rights making up an "image" are likely to fall within the definition of intellectual property for s. 579(2) ITTOIA 2005, and a payment to a non-resident requires deduction under s. 906 Income Tax Act 2007 — s. 907 having been widened by Finance Act 2016 along OECD lines and applying to payments made on or after 28 June 2016. Treaty relief is not automatic: s. 917A ITA 2007 denies it between connected persons where the payment forms part of a tax-avoidance arrangement, on top of the treaties' own anti-abuse provisions — the PPT and GAAR.

Hence the selection of targets: the less recognisable the player, the more obvious it is that the company exists to arbitrage rates — corporation tax instead of the top rate of income tax — and the thinner the file is on independent valuations, third-party licensing deals and external revenue in the company itself. Formally this is a valuation dispute; practically it is recharacterisation of the whole amount as salary, with contributions and a penalty on the club.

Guernsey: the only image rights register in the world

In 2012 Guernsey did what nobody else has done: it turned the persona into a registrable property right. Under the Image Rights (Bailiwick of Guernsey) Ordinance, 2012 what is registered is not an "image" but a personnage — under s. 1 a natural person, a legal person, a "joint personality" (two or more persons inseparably linked in the public mind), a group (a team or collective) or a fictional character. Section 3 lists the protected attributes: voice, signature, likeness, appearance, silhouette, face, verbal and facial expressions, gestures, mannerisms, any other distinctive characteristic, and any image of the personnage. Once registered, the right becomes a property right — it can be enforced, licensed and assigned, and licences and assignments are themselves entered on the register, failing which the transaction has no effect against third parties.

Terms and fees under the current schedule are modest: registering the personality of a natural person costs £500 (one image included), a joint personality or a group £750, a legal person £1,000; each additional image is £50. A personality registration runs for ten years and renews for further ten-year periods indefinitely; the registration of a particular image runs for three years, renewable for three, and renewal costs the same as registration. Recording a licensee or an assignment is £50 each, an opposition £250, an application for invalidity or revocation £200. Where the rights holder is not the registered personality, filings are made by a Guernsey-registered image rights agent (£500 on registration and £500 a year). The Amendment Ordinance, 2017 empowered the Registrar to issue codes of practice, including standards of conduct for agents.

The trade mark: a second registrable title over the same attributes

The Guernsey register is not the only way of turning an attribute of the persona into a registrable right. The very set that s. 3 of the 2012 Ordinance enumerates — name, nickname, signature, recognisable gesture — is also registrable as a trade mark. The route, though, is the ordinary one: EUIPO for an EU trade mark, the USPTO for the United States, the Madrid system for international registration. There is no separate register of sportspeople, no special application form and no sporting time limit at the offices themselves — a footballer's application follows the same procedure and lands in the same Nice classes as a coffee shop's.

Whether any international federation or league runs a register or a clearing procedure of its own for athletes' marks is not confirmed by primary sources, so a particular athlete's portfolio is checked separately against the rules of their own federation and league. Rule 40 of the Olympic Charter, most often invoked in this context, governs advertising by an athlete's personal sponsors during the Games, not the registration of marks — the USOPC issued its internal Rule 40 guidance for Milan-Cortina 2026 in September 2025. The USPTO's NIL resource page for student athletes is, on the announcement of 13.07.2026, likewise general material on trade mark registration with no sport-specific filing route; the American tax angle on NIL, royalties as against Form 1099-NEC, is covered in the note on NIL.

What is registered is always a specific sign in specific classes: a word mark over a name or a nickname, a figurative mark over a signature or a stylised victory gesture. The 13th edition of the Nice Classification (NCL 13-2026) has been in force since 01.01.2026; among the new entries is artificial intelligence as a service in class 42. The fees are the same for every applicant and differ only by office.

The EUIPO and Madrid fees are stated as at August 2026.

Somebody else's application for your name, and the limits of protection

A mark comes out of an application, and anyone may file one before you do. In the EU such filings are extinguished through bad faith: by judgment of 14.05.2019 in Case T-795/17 Moreira v EUIPO the General Court declared invalid the registration of the word mark NEYMAR obtained by a third party on an application filed in December 2012 in class 25 of the Nice Classification. The ground today is art. 59(1)(b) EUTMR 2017/1001; the case itself applied art. 52(1)(b) of Regulation 207/2009 as then in force. The other side of the same fame is the MESSI case: by judgment of 17.09.2020 in Joined Cases C-449/18 P and C-474/18 P the Court of Justice dismissed the appeals of EUIPO and of the proprietor of the earlier MASSI mark, confirming that a sportsperson's renown neutralises the phonetic similarity of the signs. EUIPO also counts earlier rights to a name, to the image of a person and copyright among the relative grounds of invalidity (EUIPO FAQ on invalidity and revocation).

Michael Jordan's Chinese litigation shows the price of reacting late. On retrial by the Supreme People's Court in cases (2016) Zui Gao Fa Xing Zai No. 15, 26 and 27, the Chinese-character mark Qiaodan was held to infringe the right to a name, while the romanised QIAODAN, in cases of the same series, was not. By decision (2018) Zui Gao Fa Xing Zai No. 32 mark No. 6020578 was invalidated: the right to the Chinese-character name was upheld and the claim to the likeness in the silhouette logo rejected. On 30.12.2020 the Shanghai Second Intermediate People's Court ordered Qiaodan Sports to stop using the Chinese-character name in its company name and its marks — save for those registered more than five years earlier — and to publish an apology. The five years are no accident: art. 45 of the Trade Mark Law allows five years to challenge a registration on relative grounds, with an exception for a bad-faith filing against a well-known mark.

In the United States the logic is the mirror image and works at the entry point: registration of a mark consisting of the name of a particular living individual requires that individual's written consent — 15 U.S.C. 1052(c). The constitutionality of the provision was confirmed in Vidal v. Elster, 602 U.S. (2024), decided 13.06.2024.

The United States: Goosen and García — the court splits the fee itself

In the US the right of publicity is a matter of state law, and there is no dedicated anti-avoidance rule for image structures; there is, however, direct authority on splitting an endorsement fee between royalty and services — and characterisation drives both the source of the income and treaty relief. In Goosen v. Commissioner (136 T.C. 547, 2011) the golfer split the consideration under his "on-course" contracts with TaylorMade, Izod and Titleist equally between services and royalties; the IRS argued that 100% was payment for services; the court upheld the 50/50 split, observing that the player's name and international reputation had value beyond his golfing skill.

Garcia v. Commissioner (140 T.C. No. 6, decided 14.03.2013) is compulsory reading for anyone who treats "85/15" as a universal ratio. Sergio García, a Swiss resident, allocated his TaylorMade consideration 85% to royalties for the use of his image and 15% to personal services; the royalties went to a Delaware LLC and onward to a Swiss LLC, so that no US tax arose on them. The court declined to carry the contractual split into the tax computation and reallocated the payments 65% royalty and 35% services, while confirming that the royalties were exempt under the US–Switzerland treaty and the US-source personal services income was not. A contractual ratio binds no tax authority, in Spain or in the United States; only the provable economics of the deal do — see taxes for a US athlete.

Article 17 of the Model Convention: the ceiling on any structure

Even a flawless image company does not remove tax in the country of performance. Article 17(1) of the OECD Model Convention allows income of an entertainer or sportsperson from personal activities in the other contracting state to be taxed there, and paragraph 2 — the real constraint — extends the rule to cases where the income from those personal activities accrues not to the performer but to another person: an intermediary company, a management vehicle, an image structure. The 2014 Commentary update addressed sponsorship and endorsement payments: income directly connected with the performance may be taxed in the country of performance even if received elsewhere, and §9.5 extended the same direct-connection test to "image rights" (analysis of the 2014 changes). The triggers were Agassi in the United Kingdom and Goosen and Garcia in the United States: the fact that both the sportsperson and the sponsor were non-residents did not displace taxation in the country of performance.

That yields the working dividing line. The part of the income that could not have been earned without performing in the country gravitates to art. 17 and stays taxable at source; the part that lives independently of the competition calendar — global merchandising licences, digital endorsement, income from a long-lived brand — gravitates to art. 7 or art. 12. Allocating a tour across countries is covered in touring tax residence.

Where the persona is property: a map of the regimes

Six regimes answer two different questions: what the persona is as a title, and what tax does with it.

The other half of the same map is the dedicated rule against image structures and withholding at source.

Title answers the question "what did you licence?", not "why that much?".

Image-rights companies across jurisdictions: the payer's side and the licensor's side

The six-row map answers what the persona is. An image-rights structure is judged at two further points: in the country of the payer, where the rules decide whether the fee is salary, a royalty or neither, and in the country of the licensor company, where the rules decide what is left of the royalty after tax. The first table covers the payer's side for eight countries where clubs, sponsors and platforms actually pay from.

The licensor's side decides the other half. Trade marks and other marketing intangibles are excluded from every nexus-compliant IP box, so an image company is taxed at the headline rate of its domicile, and the question becomes what that rate is and what leaves the company on the way out.

The withholding columns come from the rate map in withholding tax and the box eligibility from the IP box comparison; the French redevance rests on art. L222-2-10-1 of the Code du sport, which takes the payment outside salary only within the share that the sector's collective agreement fixes.

What the two tables add up to

The payer's side is where structures die. Spain and, from April 2027, the United Kingdom turn a club's payment to a player's company into the player's own income, the first by attribution above 15% and the second by statute; France goes the other way and gives the club a statutory route to pay a redevance outside salary, but only inside a capped share. Italy, Germany, Portugal, the Netherlands and the United States have no dedicated rule, which does not make them permissive: the general recharacterisation tools and, in the United States, a court that reallocates the fee itself do the same work case by case.

The licensor's side explains why low-tax domiciles no longer carry the structure. With marketing intangibles outside every box, the choice is between a headline rate and a zero rate, and a zero-rate company with no staff and a single connected payer is precisely what the Spanish Supreme Court called a marker of evasion. Withholding at source then closes the arithmetic: Italy's 22.5%, Portugal's 25% and Germany's 15.825% on the gross royalty fall on a company taxed on net profit, and without a treaty that reduces them they become the effective tax on the structure.

Profile → where an image company still works

What has to be in the file for an image company to survive an audit

Synthesising Spanish, British and American practice produces one set of requirements, identical whatever the licensor's jurisdiction.

• An independent valuation of the image, prepared before signature and against comparable transactions, rather than reverse-engineered to hit a percentage.
• Separate negotiations and separate documents: the employment contract and the licence discussed apart, with different subject matter and different territorial scope of rights — synchronised "package" adjustments of the two amounts were exactly what sank Hull City.
• Actual exploitation: campaigns, releases, reports, revenue from third parties.
• Economic substance in the company itself: people, functions, decisions, not just invoices issued.
• Arm's-length royalties under the transfer pricing rules as part of the IP ownership structure.
• Withholding tax with treaty relief, checked in advance rather than on the day of payment.

One Spanish specific: art. 93.1.b).1.º LIRPF expressly excludes the employment relationships of professional sportspeople under Real Decreto 1006/1985 from the special regime — which means the Beckham law is unavailable to a footballer and its rates (24% up to €600,000, 47% above) do not apply. For a sportsperson in Spain the image question is therefore twice as sharp: the ordinary progressive IRPF scale, plus art. 92, plus the criminal case law.

Creators: the same logic without article 92

For a blogger, streamer or musician with no employer, art. 92 LIRPF does not engage — there is no employment relationship, so the condition in para. 1(b) fails. But only one rule out of four drops away: arm's-length pricing of intra-group licences, substance in the licensor, withholding tax and the treaty principal purpose test all remain. Add the sector's own transparency machinery: platforms report creators' income under DAC7, and part of the money arrives already withheld — see platform withholding. A British performer operating through their own company must also clear the PSC and IR35 circuit separately.