In football, most of the attention is on the players themselves or the manager.
Yet these aren’t necessarily the people with the most power. They are answerable to the likes of the sporting director and the chief executive, and these people mostly get away with life outside the limelight. What goes on behind the scenes at a football club has more bearing on what we see on the field than most fans understand. Yet any negative press or anger from fans is usually directed towards people who can only carry a portion of the responsibility.
There is another powerful figure lurking in the shadows though. A person not associated with any club in particular. A mercenary whose first interest is making money for themselves.
The football agent.
As a profession, football agents were not even recognised until 1991. Intermediaries with slightly different roles did exist before then, but once FIFA set up the first official licensing system for football agents their power and number grew at rapid pace. This is evident when looking at player wages.
In 1995 the average salary for a Premier League Player was just under £4,000 per week, but it doubled to over £11,000 per week in the year 2000. Bear in mind that George Best was earning a record breaking £1,000 a week way back in 1968, so wages from then until the early 1990s hadn’t moved a great deal, especially if we consider inflation.
Of course these average salaries don’t tell the whole story. At the same time the average salary was £11k, Roy Keane became the first player ever to earn £50,000 per week, and Sol Campbell doubled that in 2001, so there was already huge money floating around at the top. From this point on wages and transfer fees sky rocketed, to the point where we have seen transfer fees a hair under £200 million and weekly wages of over £3 million.
This has also made it increasingly difficult for smaller clubs to compete with bigger clubs. The divide is growing larger and larger because they just can’t compete for players financially.
It’s insane, and it’s all because of football agents.
What Does a Football Agent Actually Do?
Most people in the sports world have agents. In fact most people in any type of entertainment role do: authors, actors, singers, tennis players, athletes, you name it.
These people are experts in their field, but their field tends to be something creative or sports based. So when it comes to contracts and the law they have little to no clue what they are doing. This leaves them open to exploitation from the companies they work with, so agents exist to bridge that gap.
Their job is supposed to be to work in their clients’ best interests. They should get them the best deal possible in contract negotiations, ensure they have safe and fair working conditions, advise them on career moves and even manage their brand to some extent in terms of sponsorship deals.
Of course, an agent has someone else to look after besides their clients: themselves.
Let’s not pretend the people working as football agents got into the job because they were passionate about footballers getting a fair deal. They smelled money.
Agents work on commission. There are different ways they earn this commission, but their pay packet is directly related to the money being exchanged between the club and the player. They may earn a percentage of the player’s wages, their signing on bonus, or the transfer fee, not to mention scraping off the top of sponsorship deals, image rights, appearances, and things like that.
They may like and admire the people they work for, but professionally, they see these players as a product to sell. Ronaldo’s wages at Al Nassir were reportedly £3.3 million per week, but the majority of this was made up of image rights and other things like that. He got where he is for his footballing abilities, but he is worth more as a brand than he is as a player.
When David Beckham signed a new contract for Manchester United in 2002, he was paid a reported £20k per week for use of his name and image on club merchandise. His agent did that.
It’s not just working out deals though, it can also be instigating them in the first place. An agent can get in their client’s heads and persuade them to make moves they may not otherwise have made. Agents make the most money when their big name clients move clubs or sign new contracts, so they are incentivised to not let things sit for too long.
In order to be effective they need a huge professional network of media contacts, club contacts, players and ex-players, managers and other club officials etc. They use this network to get information, spread information (true and false) and broker deals. So their job is as much about being able to talk to people and build relationships as it is about drawing up contracts, understanding legal procedures, and negotiating.
How Do They Impact the Game?
In more ways than we know.
An agent is usually behind the biggest transfer deals we hear about in the news. They might have even instigated them.
A good story which demonstrates this, is that of the late Mino Raiola. It has been alleged that he strong-armed Borussia Dortmund into selling Henrikh Mkhitaryan to Manchester United by inserting a sneaky clause into his contract. The attacking midfielder had one year left on his contract, and Dortmund would have been liable to pay Raiola millions of Euros if they refused to sell him. They could get an extra year and then lose him for free as well as paying Raiola’s compensation, or sell him and at least make some money out of it. Of course, Raiola got paid either way.
This has a multitude of knock on effects. For instance, who got less game time when Mkhitaryan joined United? Who got more at Dortmund after he left? He didn’t exactly set the world on fire at Old Trafford so he was sold to Arsenal 2 years later. How did that impact other transfer decisions at both clubs? Did the affected clubs make any tactical adjustments to accommodate the change in personnel? And on it goes.
They can impact directly on performance too.
An agent filling a player’s head with their own importance does not always work out well. They might start thinking they are bigger than the club they play for, and start acting out. They may get lazy. An agent putting pressure on them might cause anxiety and a drop in form.
Many managers and club owners are not fans of agents due to this sort of behaviour. Simon Jordan called them “Evil, divisive scum” and Alex Ferguson even called Raiola specifically a ‘shitbag’:
There are more than 15,000 football agents in the world though, and while they are all in business to make money, many of them are decent hard working people who genuinely want the best for their clients as well as themselves.
Nevertheless, they do hold a worrying amount of power.
Think about this fictional scenario.
An agent has 3 players at the same team. One of them isn’t happy and wants to leave for a bigger club who have shown interest but he has 3 years left on his contract and the club wants to keep him. The other two only have a year left on their contracts. The club are also interested in another of the agent’s clients who currently plays abroad.
The agent could tell the club that they have to sell the unhappy player, and if they don’t, he will encourage his other two players to look elsewhere in a year’s time and block the transfer of the player who is abroad. The club then have to do what he wants or they end up in a very bad situation.
This would require all the players in the scenario to basically do what their agent told them to do, which is a little unrealistic, but it demonstrates how an agent can wield power in the right situation. Imagine the discontent this agent’s players could cause in the dressing room.
They can even influence managerial decisions.
If they put pressure on a club to play their client more often or in a particular way, especially if that client is a start name, managers may buckle. Perhaps they would rather use the player as a super sub for the last 30 minutes of every game because they feel they have the most impact that way, but the agent says they will engineer a transfer unless things change. What does the manager do? And what if the manager is signed with the same agent?
Agents have also been known to strategically leak information to the press in an attempt to force the hand of a club, or drive up their client’s value. Look at the state of Man United’s signing of Antony from Ajax in 2022 – his agent, Junior Pedroso, must be a magician.
So agents are responsible for a lot of what goes on behind the scenes before the game we watch at the weekend. Their power is huge and they can quite literally hold clubs to ransom if the situation is right.