Ryan Giggs can be legally named as 'affair' footballer

Ryan Giggs can now be named as the footballer behind a legal order preventing the publication of details of an alleged extra-marital affair.

Mr Giggs sought the injunction in April after a Sun article about an unnamed player's alleged affair with a model.

His lawyer told the High Court that he now consented to the lifting of the anonymity part of the injunction.

Mr Giggs is trying to claim damages for distress from the Sun, alleging it breached his right to privacy.

Mr Giggs's lawyer - Hugh Tomlinson QC - said his client was claiming damages for the subsequent re-publication of information in other newspapers and on the internet.

"He has suffered damage and distress by the chain of events that has been set off by the publication of the article in The Sun," he said.

"We say the printing of information on the front page of a national newspaper can give rise to an action for misuse of private information."

Mr Tomlinson said the Sun article had "generated a large media storm" and that the damages claim was about "providing effective protection" for Mr Giggs's right to privacy under the European Convention on Human Rights.

But the newspaper said that Mr Giggs's claim was "dead in the water" and should be stopped.

After hearing legal arguments at the Royal Courts of Justice in London, Mr Justice Tugendhat reserved his decision on whether the case should go to trial.

Breached by thousands

Mr Giggs had been granted an injunction on the basis that TV presenter Imogen Thomas - the woman the Sun accused him of conducting an affair with - appeared to have been trying to blackmail him.

However, the 2003 Miss Wales and former Big Brother contestant took legal action against him and, in December 2011, Mr Giggs accepted that she had not been blackmailing him.

In court on Tuesday, Mr Giggs's lawyer - Hugh Tomlinson QC - said the injunction that had been supposed to stop his client being identified as the subject of the Sun's story had been breached by thousands of people on the internet.

Mr Giggs, a former Welsh international who has played for Manchester United for 20 years, was widely identified on social networking sites and in a Scottish newspaper.

In May, Lib Dem MP John Hemming also named Mr Giggs during an urgent Commons question on privacy orders.

Using parliamentary privilege to break the court order, he said it would not be practical to imprison the 75,000 Twitter users who had named the player.