'Agents are only a symptom of the problem - football is rotten from top to bottom'

11:42, 17 May 2011
Miguel Delaney

Miguel Delaney looks into the tricky world of football agents to try and find the truth

It’s time for a mid-level Premier League player to renegotiate his contract. He expects a wage-rise or maybe a specific clause to hold up negotiations. Neither does. There is one significant sticking point though. The club’s manager has been speaking to his own representative. The boss then goes back to the player.

“If you want a new contract with this club, then you’ve got to sign with my agent. That’s the only way you’re going to progress.”

Elsewhere, a group of businessmen take over a decently-supported British side. They conclude the deal with the bank’s money – investing none of their own – and then take salaries from the club. Throughout all the negotiations, they only deal with one favoured agent. Eagerly sitting on the cash merry-go-round, that representative is paid a huge figure in agent’s fees only to then give the businessmen a backhander.

There are specific names attached to each of these individuals. Some well-known. Their identities can’t be revealed for legal reasons but that’s almost irrelevant due to the fact that the examples fit a number of different situations that are happen across the breadth of British football.

It’s a convenient out, at the moment, for many managers and officials to blame the “agent culture”. And, as one agent working extensively in Britain us, the generally negative image of his profession is “completely justified in a lot of cases”.

As Alex Ferguson said in October, “You have to deal with agents of this world today, which is difficult. The players are no problem… some agents are difficult.”

At that point, Wayne Rooney’s representative, Paul Stretford, was – whether rightly or wrongly – portrayed as a Iago figure manipulating events to his own ends.

That image was muddied further by some of the whispers that appeared in the media over that time. One indicated that the timing of Rooney’s disenchantment was interesting given that, only last season, Stretford received a half-million-pound bonus because Rooney had stayed at Old Trafford for five years. Another pointed out that Fifa plan to reduce a licensed agent’s total commission from any deal to three per cent in 2011, meaning a representative might want to maximise his earnings under the current regulations. Then there’s the financial magic Mino Raiola worked in Zlatan Ibrahimovic’s convoluted move from the San Siro to Barcelona and back again.

With such stories, it becomes easy to apportion blame for football’s river of greed. But, just as the Rooney situation had much more to it than the player supposedly nodding his head to each of Stretford’s suggestions, the sport’s very relationship with agents is a great deal more complicated than that. For a start, Ferguson himself was as selective with the truth when it came to his view of agents as he was with his view of the Rooney situation. He may not think much of Stretford but he didn’t mention the manner in which other agents have helped him build his Old Trafford empire.

Jorge Mendes advised United on Cristiano Ronaldo, Nani, Anderson and Bebe. Much earlier, the more notorious Rune Hauge provided valued opinion on Peter Schmeichel, Andrei Kanchelskis and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer.

While it should be said that none of these transfers were suspicious or irregular, each of them illustrate how ingrained agents are in the infrastructure of the game. While many are indeed the parasites Ferguson indicates, some are simply products of the system.

And, when it comes to actual corruption in football, agents aren’t exactly the cause many would otherwise claim. Instead, a very different impression emerges from those prepared to talk candidly.

There is definitely a space for agents in the sport, as shown by the many who go about their job ethically and the decent football people they deal with. The problem, however, is that the very nature of the job attracts opportunists. And their numbers are disproportionately boosted by the area of the job. As a series of individuals – from ex-players and agents to those currently involved – insisted, “the industry is rotten at many levels from top to bottom”. In essence then, it’s not just certain agents that are crooked. They only represent the crookedness of many areas of the game.

A series of stories illustrate this. One source said that managers have often told them “yes, I’ll sign your player but, when we pay you an agent’s fee of a 100 grand, you pay some that of back to me”.

The United We Stand fanzine recently printed an anecdote – corroborated elsewhere – of a Premier League manager turning to his bench towards the end of a game: “Right, which one of you is on the biggest appearance fee? OK, you go on so long as x percentage comes back to me.”

A different company was approached by an agent saying that he was in partnership with a Premier League manager. If the company gave him £10,000, the lone agent could provide any young players they put forward with a contract at the manager’s club. The teenager would then be moved on at a profit because his CV had been greatly enhanced.

As one former player explained, “if you were to ask supporters who they think is on the take, they’d come out with the same names, ‘oh, he looks dodgy’, this idea that there’s only a few. There’s a lot at it.”

Indeed, it shouldn’t be forgotten that only four years ago Steve McLaren’s agent Colin Gordon expressly stated that “English football is totally corrupt”.

“We’re not talking about the old brown paper envelopes. We’re talking about millions upon millions. It is a very, very sophisticated business. Are agents corrupt? Not all – but the majority. It’s accepted abroad… the English game is considered the ‘dirty man of Europe’.”

Back then, Gordon also claimed the system is so sophisticated that investigators will never trap the agents and managers who avail of it. But there’s another reason, as a British-based agent told us.

“There are a lot of dodgy agents and unethical people in football, but the only way you can do an unethical deal is if there are two parties to it. And it will never be flushed out of football because it will be like turkeys voting for Christmas.

“Even when they go and carry out a review, they’ll go through that system for six months and, by the end, they’ll very rarely nail someone. The reason is because, right from top to bottom, there are people who are prepared to compromise their ethics because there’s so much involved. If they have to break the rules to get a player, they’ll break the rules.”

* * *

Perhaps fittingly, it was football’s own greed that created the space and necessity for agents in the first place. As the professional game began to expand, the maximum wage was introduced in 1900. Added to it, however, was the unjustifiable restraint of trade – as the British High Court ruled in 1963 – that was the ‘retain and transfer’ system. This allowed the clubs undue control of contracts and wages, right down to the penny. At that stage, football was more about serfdom than stardom. In such a climate, agents disappeared from the game other than isolated instances like when Denis Compton signed a deal with Brylcreem or the more liberally-regulated Italian clubs began to sign players such as Denis Law and John Charles.

It was around this time, in the late ’50s and early ’60s, that the situation in Britain reached breaking point. Most notoriously, the management teams at Manchester United and Liverpool colluded to keep wages down. It was one of the reasons John Giles left for Leeds. Along the same lines, George Eastham refused to sign a new contract with Newcastle in 1959 and requested a transfer, which the club refused. Eastham refused to play for the club again and – as the retain-and-transfer system dictated – left the game to find alternative employment. Although Newcastle eventually sanctioned Eastham’s move to Arsenal in October 1960, the player brought proceedings against the club with the backing of the increasingly influential PFA. The “retain” elements of the system were shattered.

From there, a new world was opened up. But slowly at first. It wasn’t until the explosion of commercialisation in football in the mid-70s – largely thanks to Joao Havelange’s control of Fifa and the influence of sports promotion pioneer Horst Dassler – that agents began to really flex their muscles. By the late ’80s, almost a decade before the Pandora’s Box that was the Bosman ruling, the English FA were already looking to curb their power.

In many instances, agents were merely former players exacting revenge on the system that for so long exploited them. To a certain degree, that still remains the case.

As part of this article, we attempted to survey each of the 20 agents licensed to work in Ireland. Of the 13 that responded, their backgrounds cover a broad spectrum. Despite those differences, the majority adhere to a broad ideal of what an agent should be and do.

Fundamentally, an agent handles a player’s negotiations with clubs as well as any outside business interests such as sponsorship and image rights in order to prevent him getting exploited. Eamon McLoughlin – a former League of Ireland player for UCD who also studied sports business before getting a job in Platinum One – explains this is where many players are happy to leave it.

“Some will negotiate their contract and just go ‘grand, see you again in two and a half years’. Other guys want to speak every day about how training’s going. It mightn’t be so much a job they want you to do, they just want you to stay in touch… sometimes a younger guy, you’ll get a text. ‘I’ve had a fight with my girlfriend, please ring me.’”

Gbolahan Balogun is a trainee lawyer as well as another ex-player. One of five Nigerians among Ireland’s 20 licensed agents, he has been in the country for 11 years and “wanted to keep his passion for the game”. Balogun represents clients across a diverse range of countries and leagues – from Britain’s lower divisions to North Africa and the Middle East.

“My day involves trying to get in touch with clubs and a lot of telephone work. I speak with scouts in a lot of different countries. For players you represent, you are almost their personal manager. I think a lot of that is overlooked. You can also go a whole year without signing any player or getting any movement and people don’t hear about that. A player might have to go to Dubai but still not get a move at the end… You also have to take out indemnity insurance which is very expensive.”

William McSorley represents a number of players in the top divisions either side of the border as well as a goalkeeper in League One. He explains, though, that a lot of his work consists of agents from abroad ringing for advice or to consult. In other words, lubricating transfers.

It was that side of the industry Gary Neville appeared critical of when he called for “the removal of agents from the game” in 2007, claiming that players didn’t “need people taking hundreds of thousands of pounds off them, just good advice from a solicitor or an accountant”.

That is exactly why there is now a licensing exam, however. As Balogun explains, “it is not something that you just go and pass. It is everything about football, there a lot of legal issues and technical questions. Of 60 going, maybe only two pass.”

Not that the exam is flawless. Peter Auf der Heyde is a South African living in Cork who sat the exam in order to help the career of a talented 15-year-old compatriot who stayed with his family. Although he passed the exam, he noticed a discrepancy when one of his answers was marked wrong. The question covered a complicated issue regarding the selection of a Saudi player in Australia. “I phoned Fifa and pointed out why they were wrong. The exam hadn’t taken into consideration that Australia and Saudi Arabia were now part of the same confederation. Although they said I could have the marks, they still didn’t have the courage to inform the national associations of this. And that’s an indication.”

Auf der Heyde feels this minor matter is just a tip of an iceberg when it comes to the general laxness in policing either agents or corruption in football. As the football consultant and scout Tor-Kristian Karlsen recently told the BBC, “the agent business is like the Wild West. It’s messy and too time-consuming for Fifa to police and too bureaucratic.” Indeed, the world body is currently debating whether to de-regulate agents again since an estimated 70 per cent of international transfers are completed with unlicensed agents. In some cases this is relatively innocent. Many representatives are family members. In other instances, McLoughlin explains, “a lot of people develop a relationship with a player and suddenly realise they can make money off the back of him. They fall into and think it’s simple, that there’s no skill-set – if that is the right phrase.”

Neither the actual skills required nor the exam can prepare agents for some player requests though. An English agent tells the story of a colleague attempting to sign up a middle-tier Premier League player. The clincher, however, was odd.

“Will you do me Tesco’s?”

“Sorry?”

“You know, me shopping?”

“We’ve had that before,” McLoughlin admits. “There was one high-profile Irish player. He turned around and said ‘will you go and get me tickets for a concert?’ We told him to go and jump. We don’t do that. A lot of players just want a yes-man. Or they just want someone who’s going to be their best friend. And I found out the hard way, players will say they’re your best friend, and then somebody will come along with a better offer.”

Often, there’s a lot of exaggeration behind better offers. Indeed, for certain members of the profession, their entire career is one long game of brinkmanship. That’s what many enjoy. The very best agents – the super-agents – legitimately have the contacts. The very worst – in the truest sense of the word – invent them.

It’s that alternative element of brinkmanship that can also bring those into the game who are merely after a fast buck. “There’s a lot of people that do live up to the image, that people would say are parasites,” McLoughlin says. “They might view the player as an asset and work with him for one year rather than develop something over the course of his career as we would try to do.”

Here, however, Balogun adopts a much more dispassionate view. “A player is a marketable commodity. Your job is to look after their interest. People don’t understand this. If I feel my player can have better options elsewhere it is my responsibility to look for the best deal and tell them. Also, you cannot tell a player what to do. Most are over 18. An agent is like a lawyer. You merely tell your client what all the options are. It would be irresponsible to not do that.”

It’s perhaps a reflection of the inherent problems football faces that so many more people will get self-righteously angry about that acceptable side of agency work, rather than the corruption that’s rife elsewhere in the business.

(A version of this article originally appeared in the Sunday Tribune)

Miguel Delaney was football journalist with the late, great Sunday Tribune (1981-2011), for whom he covered Euro 2008, the 2010 World Cup and the last five Champions League campaigns. He is also the author of Stuttgart to Saipan: the players' stories

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