There is widespread speculation that the 34 current and past Essendon players will take the club to court and millions of dollars would be at stake.

AFL players association chief executive Paul Marsh said his body would talk to the league and the club first.

He said if those talks do not work out, there would be a “very high” chance of court action.

“I don’t think anyone wants to drag this through the courts and add another few years to this process,” he said.

“I’d like to think we could have productive discussions to try and get to this point.

“If you can’t, then legal action is something that you look at.

“The players’ legal team will now conduct a thorough review of the decision.”

Yesterday, CAS upheld WADA’s appeal against the 34 players after the AFL anti-doping tribunal had cleared them last year of charges.

Essendon, the AFL and the players association were shocked when CAS also handed down two-year bans, backdated only by a year.

It means the 12 current Essendon players and the five at other clubs are suspended for this season.

Essendon’s season is effectively shot and the AFL Commission is expected to decide next month that captain Jobe Watson will lose his 2012 Brownlow Medal.

New club chairman Lindsay Tanner said the Bombers have massive challenges, but said he was unsure about the banned players taking legal action against Essendon.

“That’s ultimately a matter for them,” he said

“Look, it’s impossible to really assess these things, because we are not in a position to know whether anything of that kind will occur.

“Clearly, we have got big challenges in front of us for the balance of this year, for the 2016 season.”

University of Melbourne senior fellow in sports law Catherine Ordway said the CAS ruling sets possible grounds for civil legal action against the club,

“I would have thought that’s quite likely, given that the finding is so damning against Essendon as a club and what went on there, from a number of different reports now,” she said.

Describing the ruling as the “final nail in the coffin”, Ms Ordway said players may be able to mount cases that they have suffered loss.

“They’ve suffered loss not only from whatever they lose from being suspended this season but I would have thought reputation-wise for the future and potential mental and physical health issues,” she said.

The CAS decision overturned a March 2015 decision of the AFL Anti-Doping Tribunal that it was not comfortably satisfied the players had been injected with illegal peptides under a 2012 strength conditioning program at Essendon.

Because the CAS verdict means the “comfortably satisfied” standard has been met, Ordway says that meets a higher standard of proof than would be required in a civil case.

“That’s already been satisfied so that would make it an even stronger case for these athletes,” she said.

Ordway said while the CAS had found the players did not ask about what they were being injected with, and that they kept the injection program secret, those findings were unlikely to undermine a civil claim.

“I don’t think it’s fatal to a civil case. Definitely those will be factors that will be taken into account but the bottom line in a civil case is that Essendon football club is the employer and they owe a duty to care for the athletes,” she said.

-with Peter Trute, AAP