Establish what you actually have
Before anything is sent, what rights exist, what is registered, what is contractual, and what is nothing at all.
Sport
Image rights.
England and Wales has no standalone image right. Nobody owns their face the way a writer owns a copyright, and protection has to be assembled out of passing off, registered trade marks, contract and data protection. That single point explains most of what surprises athletes, clubs and brands the first time a likeness is used without permission.
What this looks like when it goes wrong
The common version is a product or a campaign carrying an athlete's name, face or something closely associated with them, sold by a business that never asked. The athlete assumes there is a right in the image itself and is told there is not. What actually matters is whether the use says something untrue about a commercial relationship, and that is a different question with a different answer.
The second is a permission that outlived its purpose. Images were licensed for a campaign, the campaign ended, and the pictures are still on a retailer site, in marketplace listings and in reseller photography that nobody controls. The grant said what could be done during the term and said very little about afterwards.
The third is an overlap nobody reconciled. An athlete signs a personal deal. The club or the competition has a category sponsor. Group rights sit with one party and individual rights with another. Both sides are reading their own contract correctly, and the contracts were never read against each other.
The fourth is an endorsement that does not exist. Supplements, betting, trading and crypto promotions attach a name and a face to a product, frequently from outside the jurisdiction and frequently behind a company that is hard to identify. Increasingly the likeness itself is generated rather than photographed, which raises questions still being worked out and does not change the first problem, which is finding out who is behind it.
What actually decides it
There is no image right, so the first question is never whether the image is yours. It is which of the available rights the use actually engages. Passing off is the usual route, and it requires goodwill, a misrepresentation and damage. A use suggesting that an athlete has endorsed or is connected with a product is capable of being a misrepresentation. A use carrying no such suggestion, such as a photograph published for its news value, may engage nothing at all.
Registration changes the position more than anything else does. A name, a nickname, a signature, a logo, a distinctive celebration and other identifiers can be registered as trade marks for the goods and services that carry the commercial value. A registered right turns a difficult evidential argument into a straightforward one, and it is what allows a listing to be removed quickly. Without registration you are left with passing off, which is slower and depends on evidence you have to assemble every time.
Copyright in a photograph belongs to whoever took it, or to their employer, and not to the person in it. Athletes objecting to a picture are often objecting to something in which they hold no rights at all, while an agency they have never dealt with does. Establishing that early matters, because it decides whether the complaint is capable of going anywhere before anybody spends money on it.
Then there is contract, where most of the practical control sits. Playing contracts, squad and competition agreements, sponsorship agreements and any separate image arrangement between them decide what a club may use, what the athlete kept, and what a sponsor bought. Data protection obligations sit alongside all of it, because a likeness is personal data and commercial use of it can engage duties independent of any intellectual property right. That is not a general power to stop publication, but it is sometimes a route where nothing else is available.
What we do
Register what can be registered
Names, nicknames, signatures, logos and other identifiers, in the classes that carry the commercial value.
Read the contracts against each other
Playing, squad, sponsorship and image arrangements reconciled, so the conflicts are found before somebody else finds them.
Deal with an unauthorised use
The use removed, and where a seller or advertiser is anonymous, a real name and address to write to, lawfully obtained.
Handle a fake endorsement
Products and promotions built on an endorsement that was never given, addressed at scale and across marketplaces.
Structure it before it is needed
Arrangements set up so that what the athlete keeps and what a club or sponsor gets is written down while everybody still agrees.
When to spend nothing
Where nothing is registered and the use carries no suggestion of endorsement, a letter frequently achieves nothing except to reveal that the position is weak. A photograph you dislike, a piece of commentary you disagree with and a fan account nobody mistakes for you are all in that category, and the real cost of acting is not the fee, it is the attention.
Small uses that are not making money are usually better left alone. The ones worth pursuing are those selling at volume and those claiming a relationship that does not exist, because they cause commercial damage that can be described. The rest is noise, and treating noise as a threat is how a manageable problem becomes a public one.
Before anything is sent
Positions harden the moment the other side takes advice, and the quiet routes stop being available once a demand has gone out. While nothing has been sent, everything is still open.