Wednesday, December 02, 2009
Cost of Football Agents
-
David Conn/The Guardian
Impoverished grass-roots facilities pay the price for agents' richesThe £70m that Premier League clubs paid to middle men for player deals is a gross measure of football's loss
As the aftershock settled on Monday night's revelation that England's 20 Premier League clubs had paid £70.7m in fees to agents this year, thoughts flooded in of other areas which could benefit enormously from so generous a slug of football's wealth. This is a league shimmering with riches, laying justifiable claim to be the world's most watched, yet in the neighbourhoods around most clubs' grounds are patches of playing fields, many without changing rooms or drainage, which would be transformed by a drop of that agents' bounty.
The Premier League agreed with the government in 1999 to share a fraction of its television windfalls with the impoverished grassroots and, together with the FA and government, currently pays £15m to the Football Foundation for investment in the facilities on which millions of enthusiasts are expected to play the game. That, then, is £55m less for the grassroots nationwide, than the £70.7m paid to a small clutch of individual agents.
Financial difficulties at the FA following the collapse of Setanta have meant the governing body has been forced to defer £3m of its payment to the foundation this year; the Premier League has refused the FA £5m towards the bid to bring the 2018 World Cup to England; all clubs have a duty to make ends meet but the £70.7m does show the £308,000 tax bill which almost sent Accrington Stanley out of existence earlier this month in stark relief. The volunteers mostly running clubs at non-league level fret about the cost of turning floodlights on during these leafless months or replacing balls booted out of sight. The list is truly endless.
Malcolm Clarke, the chairman of the Football Supporters' Federation, reacted to this first publication of the Premier League's payments to agents by saying there were "dozens of areas any fan could think of" where the money could have been better spent.
"Just think what fans have to pay in high ticket prices to watch matches," he said. "It is mystifying that so much of supporters' money is paid out to agents. It is not clear to fans what work agents actually do or why they have to be paid such high fees in commission."
The Premier League's list and club-by-club breakdown was revelatory, although not accompanied by much in the way of explanation, but Mel Stein, of the Association of Football Agents, presented his own.
"I don't think these figures are unreasonable," he said. "Think of the value agents bring to clubs. There are people in football, such as at the leagues, who do not earn much and they are jealous of agents earning a decent living."
Jerome Anderson, a leading players' agent for almost 30 years since he first represented a 21-year-old Charlie Nicholas and a 15-year-old David Rocastle at Arsenal in the early 1980s, mounted a spirited defence of his profession. He argued that football today is a complicated global industry, in which the Premier League clubs collectively earn billions, and agents help deliver the players whose popularity fuels the league's attraction.
"Clubs pay agents freely because we have the experience and knowledge to identify players, or conclude deals," Anderson said. "It's easy to look at these figures and think they're excessive but people should appreciate the expertise, genuinely, which goes into the work."
That would be easier to do if clubs and agents were more open about the deals done and for what the money was paid. Agents' work is still generally shrouded in darkness – or commercial confidentiality – which in recent years has been opened to only chinks of light. For a brief period following the exposé that Sir Alex Ferguson's son, Jason, worked as an agent on several United deals, the club published all payments it made to agents, deal by deal. That produced precious insights, including the £500,000 paid to the agent Pini Zahavi to coax Fulham's chairman Mohamed Al Fayed into considering selling Louis Saha to United for £12.8m in January 2004. Ruud van Nistelrooy's agent, Rodger Lindse, was paid £1.339m for renegotiating the Dutch striker's contract in 2004, and £1.5m was payable to Paul Stretford's Proactive agency for working on Wayne Rooney's move from Everton to United for £20m in August the same year.
However, after a few years of being the only ones practising such openness United, under the new ownership of the Florida-based Glazer family, stopped doing so. Since then we have made do with the odd scrap where a club or agent has confirmed a payment or a case has reached the spotlight of the courts. In 2005 we learned that £3m was the maximum potentially payable to Zahavi when Yakubu Ayegbeni moved to Middlesbrough, and Zahavi was also paid £900,000 by Chelsea this January when Wayne Bridge moved to Manchester City – one of the deals covered by the figures released this week.
As for what agents do for this money, the Premier League made it clear that they no longer act solely as the advisers to players. The £70.7m was earned in a number of ways, including being employed by clubs directly, to help sign a player, or assist in selling one. Agents were also paid for representing players when signing with a club or renegotiating an existing deal.
Both Stein and Anderson confirmed that agents are generally paid 5% of the value of deals, either of a transfer fee when acting for a club or of the overall sum of a player's pay during the course of a contract where an agent represented the player. Some critics argue that, like other professionals, agents should be paid a fee according to the time taken to do the work – stories of agents making a few phone calls for a £1m fee make the eyes water. Anderson, though, argued that clubs are willing payers of a system which has helped to transform the Premier League into the spectacle it is.
Long-held suspicions that some of the fortune paid to agents finds its way back to managers or club officials in "bungs" was given credibility by the proven case of George Graham. As Arsenal's manager he received £285,000 from the agent Rune Hauge after signing the midfielder John Jensen as long ago as 1992. Since then the Premier League has held its inquiry by Quest and the City of London police marched into an investigation of football "corruption" but no "bungs" have been found. Up to 30 cases have been referred to Fifa by the FA for sundry alleged irregularities in the past two years but, to the FA's intense frustration, nothing has yet been concluded on any of them.
The FA, which pushed for the Premier League to publish agents' fees, hopes that exposure may lead to reform, to the extraordinary £70.7m reducing over time, as the Football League's total has since its clubs began publishing their total payments in 2004-05.
Many questions remain about which agents are paid how much, by whom, for doing what, and where the money goes, but the sum of public knowledge did take a welcome, £70.7m step forward this week.
Five big agencies: Who advises whom in the Premier League
Stellar Group
Leading clients
Peter Crouch, Ashley Cole, Ledley King, Kolo Touré, Carlton Cole Agent: Jonathan Barnett
Background
Jonathan Barnett, Stellar's chairman, is a cricket rather than football fan. He set up Stellar in 1994 after Brian Lara, one of his clients, introduced him to
a property developer called David Manasseh. The late Les Sealey was its first football client and over the past decade the business has snowballed, with Stellar having offices in Africa and South America and a client base of more than 500 sportsmen and women
Base Soccer
Leading clients
Aaron Ramsey Agent: David Baldwin
Tom Huddlestone Gary Porter
Aaron Lennon Leon Angel
Gilberto Silva Frank Trimboli
Arsène Wenger Leon Angel
Background
Established in 1997 and run by Leon Angel, who is also a chartered accountant, Base Soccer has continued to grow and now represents more than 100 players, both at home and overseas, and also works on behalf of managers and clubs
Wasserman Media Group
Leading clients
Jamie Carragher, Robbie Keane &
Steven Gerrard Agent: Struan Marshall
Michael Owen Rhodri Burgess
Joleon Lescott Simon Bayliff
Background
WMG acquired SFX and its enviable list of football clients in 2006, with the US Sports marketing giant going on to play an influential role in many of the deals involving leading Premier League players, including Joleon Lescott's move to Manchester City and Michael Owen's transfer to Manchester United in the summer
First Artist
Leading clients
Andrey Arshavin, Marco Materazzi, Pedro Mendes
& Harry Redknapp Agent: Phil Smith
Background
Jon Smith set up First Artist in 1986 and now runs the company alongside his brother, Phil. It also has interests in media, events and entertainment management. First Artist represents Arsenal's Russia forward Andrey Arshavin and the Tottenham Hotspur manager, Harry Redknapp. It was involved in the summer transfers of Emmanuel Adebayor, Niko Kranjcar and Sébastien Bassong among others
SEM
Leading clients
Eduardo da Silva & Kieran Gibbs Agent: Jerome Anderson
Background
Jerome Anderson formed Sport Entertainment and Media Group (SEM) in 1984, when he began representing Charlie Nicholas. Anderson has been well connected at Arsenal ever since and in the past he looked after the interests of Thierry Henry. SEM also works for clubs and Anderson was a key figure during Manchester City's spending spree under their former manager Sven-Goran Eriksson
http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/david-conn-inside-sport-blog/2009/dec/02/football-agents-premier-league
Paul Kelso/Telegraph
Agents fees: Premier League clubs and players to blame
The revelation that agents received more than £70m from Premier League clubs in a year will provoke familiar howls about “money going out of the game”, but to blame the middle-men for making a living, albeit a generous one, is to miss at least two thirds of the picture.
Agents flourish only because clubs and players allow them to. Breathtaking though it might be to discover that Pini Zahavi, patron saint of the middle-men, was paid £900,000 for assisting Wayne Bridge’s transfer from Chelsea to Manchester City, somebody at Eastlands willingly wrote the cheque.
It is a point made to me this morning by Mel Stein, chairman of the Association of Football Agents (AFA), talking in general terms rather than specifically about the Bridge deal.
“No one is holding a gun to anyone’s head to work with agents,” Stein said. “These are commercial arrangements willingly entered into by two parties. Of course a club could do the deals themselves but they don’t, and the reason is they would not do it as well. Agents perform a valuable role.
“Players on the whole are hugely appreciative too. We look after our clients and they tend to reward that with loyalty to an agent who has looked after their interests properly.”
Talk to clubs individually and they all agree that they would like to pay less. One former Premier League chief executive told me earlier this season that the huge fees he had to pay to agents was his biggest gripe about the game. “I just don’t understand why in a mature industry we have to pay these huge fees.”
One explanation was that the chief executive ran one of the less fashionable clubs in the division and needed agents’ help to persuade players to sign up. A more important factor is the viciously competitive nature of the transfer market. Players are the single most important asset in the game and, as wage inflation proves, clubs will do everything they can to secure the ones they want.
If that means that the agent gets a very good drink out of the deal then so be it. In short, every club is paying agents to get deals across the line, so every club has to keep on doing so, and as long as players trust their agents clubs will view the fee as a price worth paying.
For there to be any meaningful reform of a game that is never less dignified than on transfer deadline day all 20 clubs would have to agree to stop the carousel. But as we have seen with several other areas of financial regulation self-interest runs to deep for that to happen, and the devil will continue to take the hind-most.
In the mean time the clubs will keep paying. Despite the description “players’ agent” it is very rare that the players themselves shell out. One of the key changes to the FA’s regulations secured by the clubs and AFA was to allow clubs to pay agents on players’ behalf, as long as the fee is disclosed as a taxable benefit. So the club get their player, the agent gets his fee, and the player gets his new deal without ever having to calculate just what his agent’s five per cent has cost him. Perhaps if they did, the fees might come down.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/sport/paulkelso/100004148/clubs-and-players-to-blame-for-the-rise-of-the-agent/
David Conn/The Guardian
Impoverished grass-roots facilities pay the price for agents' richesThe £70m that Premier League clubs paid to middle men for player deals is a gross measure of football's loss
As the aftershock settled on Monday night's revelation that England's 20 Premier League clubs had paid £70.7m in fees to agents this year, thoughts flooded in of other areas which could benefit enormously from so generous a slug of football's wealth. This is a league shimmering with riches, laying justifiable claim to be the world's most watched, yet in the neighbourhoods around most clubs' grounds are patches of playing fields, many without changing rooms or drainage, which would be transformed by a drop of that agents' bounty.
The Premier League agreed with the government in 1999 to share a fraction of its television windfalls with the impoverished grassroots and, together with the FA and government, currently pays £15m to the Football Foundation for investment in the facilities on which millions of enthusiasts are expected to play the game. That, then, is £55m less for the grassroots nationwide, than the £70.7m paid to a small clutch of individual agents.
Financial difficulties at the FA following the collapse of Setanta have meant the governing body has been forced to defer £3m of its payment to the foundation this year; the Premier League has refused the FA £5m towards the bid to bring the 2018 World Cup to England; all clubs have a duty to make ends meet but the £70.7m does show the £308,000 tax bill which almost sent Accrington Stanley out of existence earlier this month in stark relief. The volunteers mostly running clubs at non-league level fret about the cost of turning floodlights on during these leafless months or replacing balls booted out of sight. The list is truly endless.
Malcolm Clarke, the chairman of the Football Supporters' Federation, reacted to this first publication of the Premier League's payments to agents by saying there were "dozens of areas any fan could think of" where the money could have been better spent.
"Just think what fans have to pay in high ticket prices to watch matches," he said. "It is mystifying that so much of supporters' money is paid out to agents. It is not clear to fans what work agents actually do or why they have to be paid such high fees in commission."
The Premier League's list and club-by-club breakdown was revelatory, although not accompanied by much in the way of explanation, but Mel Stein, of the Association of Football Agents, presented his own.
"I don't think these figures are unreasonable," he said. "Think of the value agents bring to clubs. There are people in football, such as at the leagues, who do not earn much and they are jealous of agents earning a decent living."
Jerome Anderson, a leading players' agent for almost 30 years since he first represented a 21-year-old Charlie Nicholas and a 15-year-old David Rocastle at Arsenal in the early 1980s, mounted a spirited defence of his profession. He argued that football today is a complicated global industry, in which the Premier League clubs collectively earn billions, and agents help deliver the players whose popularity fuels the league's attraction.
"Clubs pay agents freely because we have the experience and knowledge to identify players, or conclude deals," Anderson said. "It's easy to look at these figures and think they're excessive but people should appreciate the expertise, genuinely, which goes into the work."
That would be easier to do if clubs and agents were more open about the deals done and for what the money was paid. Agents' work is still generally shrouded in darkness – or commercial confidentiality – which in recent years has been opened to only chinks of light. For a brief period following the exposé that Sir Alex Ferguson's son, Jason, worked as an agent on several United deals, the club published all payments it made to agents, deal by deal. That produced precious insights, including the £500,000 paid to the agent Pini Zahavi to coax Fulham's chairman Mohamed Al Fayed into considering selling Louis Saha to United for £12.8m in January 2004. Ruud van Nistelrooy's agent, Rodger Lindse, was paid £1.339m for renegotiating the Dutch striker's contract in 2004, and £1.5m was payable to Paul Stretford's Proactive agency for working on Wayne Rooney's move from Everton to United for £20m in August the same year.
However, after a few years of being the only ones practising such openness United, under the new ownership of the Florida-based Glazer family, stopped doing so. Since then we have made do with the odd scrap where a club or agent has confirmed a payment or a case has reached the spotlight of the courts. In 2005 we learned that £3m was the maximum potentially payable to Zahavi when Yakubu Ayegbeni moved to Middlesbrough, and Zahavi was also paid £900,000 by Chelsea this January when Wayne Bridge moved to Manchester City – one of the deals covered by the figures released this week.
As for what agents do for this money, the Premier League made it clear that they no longer act solely as the advisers to players. The £70.7m was earned in a number of ways, including being employed by clubs directly, to help sign a player, or assist in selling one. Agents were also paid for representing players when signing with a club or renegotiating an existing deal.
Both Stein and Anderson confirmed that agents are generally paid 5% of the value of deals, either of a transfer fee when acting for a club or of the overall sum of a player's pay during the course of a contract where an agent represented the player. Some critics argue that, like other professionals, agents should be paid a fee according to the time taken to do the work – stories of agents making a few phone calls for a £1m fee make the eyes water. Anderson, though, argued that clubs are willing payers of a system which has helped to transform the Premier League into the spectacle it is.
Long-held suspicions that some of the fortune paid to agents finds its way back to managers or club officials in "bungs" was given credibility by the proven case of George Graham. As Arsenal's manager he received £285,000 from the agent Rune Hauge after signing the midfielder John Jensen as long ago as 1992. Since then the Premier League has held its inquiry by Quest and the City of London police marched into an investigation of football "corruption" but no "bungs" have been found. Up to 30 cases have been referred to Fifa by the FA for sundry alleged irregularities in the past two years but, to the FA's intense frustration, nothing has yet been concluded on any of them.
The FA, which pushed for the Premier League to publish agents' fees, hopes that exposure may lead to reform, to the extraordinary £70.7m reducing over time, as the Football League's total has since its clubs began publishing their total payments in 2004-05.
Many questions remain about which agents are paid how much, by whom, for doing what, and where the money goes, but the sum of public knowledge did take a welcome, £70.7m step forward this week.
Five big agencies: Who advises whom in the Premier League
Stellar Group
Leading clients
Peter Crouch, Ashley Cole, Ledley King, Kolo Touré, Carlton Cole Agent: Jonathan Barnett
Background
Jonathan Barnett, Stellar's chairman, is a cricket rather than football fan. He set up Stellar in 1994 after Brian Lara, one of his clients, introduced him to
a property developer called David Manasseh. The late Les Sealey was its first football client and over the past decade the business has snowballed, with Stellar having offices in Africa and South America and a client base of more than 500 sportsmen and women
Base Soccer
Leading clients
Aaron Ramsey Agent: David Baldwin
Tom Huddlestone Gary Porter
Aaron Lennon Leon Angel
Gilberto Silva Frank Trimboli
Arsène Wenger Leon Angel
Background
Established in 1997 and run by Leon Angel, who is also a chartered accountant, Base Soccer has continued to grow and now represents more than 100 players, both at home and overseas, and also works on behalf of managers and clubs
Wasserman Media Group
Leading clients
Jamie Carragher, Robbie Keane &
Steven Gerrard Agent: Struan Marshall
Michael Owen Rhodri Burgess
Joleon Lescott Simon Bayliff
Background
WMG acquired SFX and its enviable list of football clients in 2006, with the US Sports marketing giant going on to play an influential role in many of the deals involving leading Premier League players, including Joleon Lescott's move to Manchester City and Michael Owen's transfer to Manchester United in the summer
First Artist
Leading clients
Andrey Arshavin, Marco Materazzi, Pedro Mendes
& Harry Redknapp Agent: Phil Smith
Background
Jon Smith set up First Artist in 1986 and now runs the company alongside his brother, Phil. It also has interests in media, events and entertainment management. First Artist represents Arsenal's Russia forward Andrey Arshavin and the Tottenham Hotspur manager, Harry Redknapp. It was involved in the summer transfers of Emmanuel Adebayor, Niko Kranjcar and Sébastien Bassong among others
SEM
Leading clients
Eduardo da Silva & Kieran Gibbs Agent: Jerome Anderson
Background
Jerome Anderson formed Sport Entertainment and Media Group (SEM) in 1984, when he began representing Charlie Nicholas. Anderson has been well connected at Arsenal ever since and in the past he looked after the interests of Thierry Henry. SEM also works for clubs and Anderson was a key figure during Manchester City's spending spree under their former manager Sven-Goran Eriksson
http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/david-conn-inside-sport-blog/2009/dec/02/football-agents-premier-league
Paul Kelso/Telegraph
Agents fees: Premier League clubs and players to blame
The revelation that agents received more than £70m from Premier League clubs in a year will provoke familiar howls about “money going out of the game”, but to blame the middle-men for making a living, albeit a generous one, is to miss at least two thirds of the picture.
Agents flourish only because clubs and players allow them to. Breathtaking though it might be to discover that Pini Zahavi, patron saint of the middle-men, was paid £900,000 for assisting Wayne Bridge’s transfer from Chelsea to Manchester City, somebody at Eastlands willingly wrote the cheque.
It is a point made to me this morning by Mel Stein, chairman of the Association of Football Agents (AFA), talking in general terms rather than specifically about the Bridge deal.
“No one is holding a gun to anyone’s head to work with agents,” Stein said. “These are commercial arrangements willingly entered into by two parties. Of course a club could do the deals themselves but they don’t, and the reason is they would not do it as well. Agents perform a valuable role.
“Players on the whole are hugely appreciative too. We look after our clients and they tend to reward that with loyalty to an agent who has looked after their interests properly.”
Talk to clubs individually and they all agree that they would like to pay less. One former Premier League chief executive told me earlier this season that the huge fees he had to pay to agents was his biggest gripe about the game. “I just don’t understand why in a mature industry we have to pay these huge fees.”
One explanation was that the chief executive ran one of the less fashionable clubs in the division and needed agents’ help to persuade players to sign up. A more important factor is the viciously competitive nature of the transfer market. Players are the single most important asset in the game and, as wage inflation proves, clubs will do everything they can to secure the ones they want.
If that means that the agent gets a very good drink out of the deal then so be it. In short, every club is paying agents to get deals across the line, so every club has to keep on doing so, and as long as players trust their agents clubs will view the fee as a price worth paying.
For there to be any meaningful reform of a game that is never less dignified than on transfer deadline day all 20 clubs would have to agree to stop the carousel. But as we have seen with several other areas of financial regulation self-interest runs to deep for that to happen, and the devil will continue to take the hind-most.
In the mean time the clubs will keep paying. Despite the description “players’ agent” it is very rare that the players themselves shell out. One of the key changes to the FA’s regulations secured by the clubs and AFA was to allow clubs to pay agents on players’ behalf, as long as the fee is disclosed as a taxable benefit. So the club get their player, the agent gets his fee, and the player gets his new deal without ever having to calculate just what his agent’s five per cent has cost him. Perhaps if they did, the fees might come down.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/sport/paulkelso/100004148/clubs-and-players-to-blame-for-the-rise-of-the-agent/
