Image rights & takedown

Report an image or rights concern

Write to [email protected]. You do not need a lawyer, a form or a particular wording, and you do not need to prove anything before we act.

Please include, as far as you can:

• a link to a page where the image appears, or the club, competition or player it shows;
• who you are and, if you are acting for someone, who for;
• what you would like: removal, a correction, or something else.

That is all we need. We do not ask for identity documents, and we do not ask a player to prove who they are before we stop showing their photograph — a person asking us to take down their own picture is not a claim we intend to litigate.

What we do, and when

• Within one working day we acknowledge your message with a reference number.
• Within the same working day, where we can, we stop showing the image while we look at it. Removal is per image: we can stop one club's crest, or one player's photograph, without touching anything else and without a release.
• We do not put it back while the matter is open. A stopped image stays stopped until a person decides otherwise — our scheduled imports cannot undo it.
• We answer. You will hear what we did, not just that we received it.

Images are served from our own domain and cached by browsers and by a content delivery network, so a copy someone has already downloaded may persist for a while after we remove it. We invalidate the cache when we take an image down; we cannot reach into a browser that already has it.

What we show and where it comes from

thefinal displays club crests, competition logos and player photographs alongside the names, short codes and colours it has always used. The images are supplied through our football data provider, SportMonks, and are imported, re-encoded and served from our own domain — we never load an image from a third party into your browser.

SportMonks supplies the data and the files. It is not the owner of club or competition marks, and it does not grant rights over them. Club crests, competition logos, and photographs of players are the trade marks, copyright works or other rights of their respective owners, and appear here to identify the real teams, competitions and players a match involves.

We have not obtained a licence from each rightsholder for the images on this site, and we are not claiming one. We are not asserting fair use, and we are not suggesting that this page, a disclaimer, or a takedown process is a substitute for permission — it is not. If an image should not be here, tell us and it will not be.

Nothing here implies sponsorship, affiliation, endorsement or any commercial relationship. thefinal is unofficial and not affiliated with any league, club, competition or player, and is for entertainment, not gambling — no money, no prizes of value, points and ranks only.

If you are a player

A photograph of you is personal data as well as someone's copyright, and both give you a say. You can ask us to stop showing your picture, and we will, without asking why — write to [email protected] or to [email protected], whichever you prefer. Both reach the same people.

We do not import photographs of players our data provider reports as under 18. Where a date of birth is missing we cannot make that check, so if we are showing a young player who should not be here, this is the address to say so.

We show a player's name, their shirt number and their photograph, and nothing else about them. We do not analyse faces, match images between people, or infer anything from them. How we handle personal data generally is in the Privacy Policy.