ClaretandHugh’s Carol Combes addresses what she believes is the curse of the modern game – agents – who she believes are bleeding the game dry. And she makes it clear something needs to be done about them and FAST!
By Carol Combes
Many bemoan the effect that ‘T.V. money’ has had on football, and I agree, it HAS changed things!But I believe there is a far bigger curse on the modern game than that – a seriously big and very negative figure called – THE FOOTBALL AGENT!
Ok none of us want to see the return of the pre-80’s/90’s, when young players, and their naive family representatives, (usually a parent), were sometimes manipulated by crafty managers/owners to sign deals that did not take into account the player’s best interests.
But I have to ask, ‘Has anything really changed?’
What we have now is a group of people who call themselves ‘Agents’.
They assure the player that they will get them ‘the best deal’, (for a very healthy percentage of the agreed amount). In fact there are times when agents refuse to bring a player to talks without getting a promise of anything upwards of a £1 million for himself! Believe me it’s true!
And I will never be convinced that hawking young footballers around to the highest bidder is the best thing for the the player himself?
Too many youngsters have had the ‘big contract’ which has often turned out not to be not in the best interests of their football career.
There IS a conflict of interest. The players just want to play, earn well, and perform consistently for the best team, for as long as he can.
The agent, on the other hand, benefits more from repeatedly trying to ‘pimp out’ his player to the highest bidder, (and taking his cut at each deal), and the higher the profile, the more potential earnings from that player!
Football doesn’t come into their thinking. That’s just the platform to earn a fortune as regularly and often as possible. Player’s interests simply don’t come into it.
A young, impressionable, lad whose head can be turned by an older, wiser, manipulative, person, will not see they are being treated as commodities!
No matter how I look at it , I cannot see why these people have been allowed to worm their way into the footy world and hold incredible influence over the state of the game – they feel like parasitic maggots to me.
There is a Professional Footballers Association (PFA), which SHOULD be helping players – isn’t that what they are there for?
From experience, I know that a good union rep is more than capable of sorting a ‘good deal’ and looking out for their member.
If the PFA is not looking after their members interests what is their purpose? Are they too close to the interests of the clubs? These are questions which should be addressed.
There ARE large amounts of money around and the alternative is a good accountant and solicitor who should be able to professionally guide a player through the areas he will need to confront at various times in his career.
This needs tackling from all areas, so what are UEFA doing? Well, repeated murmurings are all well and good, but no action would indicate no desire to sort out this problem!
These football agents are slowly bleeding the life out of the game we love and it’s time to put a stop to these greedy ‘middlemen’!
Decent piece Carol but I would have preferred to learn how you would propose to limit their activities. Saying something needs to be done, but not to suggest how to do it leaves the article lacking.
Firstly, you need some action from those who make the rules!
Without those organisations recognising what harm the agents are doing, then ACTING, nothing will be done other than the fat cats getting fatter!
More use of a union rep, or neutral rep, at meetings? What’s everyone else’s idea?
The most logical steps are to mandate that an agent can only represent one party in any deal. To represent more than one party is a conflict of interest and in many industries would be considered corruption. The next step would be to mandate that any agent can only be remunerated by the party that he or she represents. Just these simple and logical steps would sort out most of the excesses and issues that surround agents. When Pogba moved to Man U, the agent received over £40m from the transaction and was paid by the player, the selling club and the buying club. It is shear stupidity and corrupt but what else can we expect when an organisation like FIFA sets the rules?
In the current system there is one change they could make which would change things and that is have the selling club pay the agent, that way if the agent misbehaves as they all do they will need to have it in their mind that unless they can reach agreement with the selling club prior to the sale on for example how much they will be paid then the deals won’t get done, also if the selling clubs say they refuse to work with bad agents then the player will have to decide to either ditch the agent in question or stay at the club. It is still far from a perfect position with lots of holes but better than one where agents can hold buying clubs to ransom. What would be better is if agents fees were completely transparent and capped to 10% that way all clubs would know up front what the cost is and the goalposts would move less frequently.