By Andrew Warshaw
February 28 – Football agents cream off a remarkable €400 million (£340 million/$540 million) a year from Europe’s professional clubs according to a new survey.
At a time when financial fair play is all the rage, with clubs being urged to balance the books and spend no more than they earn, the Swiss-based International Centre for Sports Studies (CIES) Football Observatory paints a worrying picture of the role of “intermediaries” who, it says, are taking huge sums out of the game.
Half the players in the so-called Big Five – England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain – are handled by 83 agents or representatives according to the survey, with only 41 per cent of licensed agents doing the job full-time.
The majority operate in other sectors such as the law and finance.
“This result shows that the general view of agents ‘baby-sitting’ their protégés does not correspond with reality,” the CIES report said.
“The former are above all busy in ‘spinning webs’ and brokering deals.”
The study also highlights a problem that has plagued the transfer market for years – third party ownership, outlawed by FIFA but still widely employed in South America.
Third party ownership has long been frowned upon in Europe yet the CIES said 15 per cent of those questioned in the survey responded by saying they had owned part of players’ transfer rights during their career as a licensed agent.
“While the ability of investors owning economic rights on players to influence clubs in employment and transfer-related matters must be proved on a case by case basis, this situation is always a very controversial one,” the report said.
To read the full report click 
here (1.1 MB).
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