Given the number of times I read that football agent Jorge Mendes won the summer transfer window, it is ironic that his profession stands technically to be legislated out of existence before the end of the 2014-15 season. If world governing body FIFA gets its way, a new regulatory system dealing not with licensed agents, but with “intermediaries” will take effect on 1 April 2015. Some, including agents I have spoken to who predict that the new rules will produce chaos, believe presumably that this date is all too appropriate.
One of the key points of the new regime is that intermediaries would not require a licence. Indeed, to judge by an email I received from an individual who had planned to secure his agent’s qualification, only to be told that all examinations had been cancelled, in at least one country it is already impossible to actually qualify as a licensed football agent.
Instead, a registration system would be set up by national associations, and intermediaries registered for each deal they are involved in. Intermediaries would also have to sign a declaration for submission to the appropriate national association. This asserts, for example, that the person in question has an “impeccable reputation” and confirms in particular that “no criminal sentence has ever been imposed upon me for a financial or violent crime”.
To me, it is as if mini-cars are to be allowed to operate in a market previously reserved for black cabs. However, INSIDEworldfootball colleague Andrew Warshaw has reported that when FIFA first proposed a review of the system in 2009, it claimed that over 70% of international transfers were being conducted using unlicensed agents anyway.
FIFA now stresses that the aim of the review was “never to deregulate the governance of the activities of players’ agents, but to propose a new system that is more transparent and simple to administer and implement, resulting, in turn, in better enforcement at national level”.
The new regulations, FIFA continues, “no longer regulate access to the activity, but instead provide an overarching framework for a better control of the activity itself by introducing minimum standards and requirements”.
FIFA is also seeking to exert its influence on the vexed issue of agents’ fees, saying the new regulations “attempt to provide for an overall rationalisation of fees paid to intermediaries by setting a limit of 3% of the player’s basic gross income, or of the transfer compensation, as a recommendation”.
Quite how much of a difference this would make depends on whose assessment of the present state of the market you place most credence in. In January 2013, FIFA was reported to have said that agents took commissions averaging 28% of cross-border deals in 2012. Yet when I heard Omar Ongaro, a member of FIFA’s legal affairs unit, talk about the issue some four years ago, he suggested that the then average was about 10%.
The Premier League has published figures showing that its 20 clubs paid £96.67 million to agents over the year to 30 September 2013. Their transfer spending in this period was some £750 million, but I would presume that the £96.67 million would cover fees earned for contract extensions too.
A report by the CIES football observatory in February 2012 on football agents in the biggest five European markets, meanwhile, estimated that commissions paid to agents accounted for “about 3.5% of the total money spent in salaries and transfer fees”.
Unfashionable as it is to show any sympathy for agents, or intermediaries, as I suppose we are going to have to get used to calling them, who are popularly portrayed as scavengers sucking blood out of the game, I find it just as hard, frankly, to sympathise with clubs, the alleged victims.
Clubs, to a significant degree, have brought this situation on themselves. They want success yesterday. That means they generally won’t give the traditional football scapegoat – the coach/manager – time. So he, in turn, can’t afford to give young players time to grow into their role. Safer to buy in the piece of his jigsaw puzzle that he thinks he is missing ready-made – an approach that very often will mean dealing with an agent, I’m sorry, intermediary.
I don’t think it is a coincidence that the most noteworthy efflorescence of young talent at an English club seen in recent times – Manchester United’s Class of ’92 – came at a club that first had the patience to back manager Sir Alex Ferguson through three and a half trophy-less seasons.
And if the short-termism of clubs, themselves stuffed to the gunnels with TV money, has had the effect of enriching top agents and their clients, it is little more than half a century since the, er , boot was very much on the other foot. Read Gary Imlach’s hauntingly brilliant My Father and Other Working-Class Football Heroes for a vivid evocation of life when the average footballer’s wages were £8 a week. It should be required reading at every club academy.
It has become customary, as the war of words against agents has been prosecuted, for the sums paid to them in fees to be referred to as money “leaving the game”. Yet the cash spent by players on tattoos and Lamborghinis, and by top executives on school fees and holiday homes, leaves the game just as definitively. And thank heavens for the sake of the wider economy that it does.
If I thought that eliminating agents, and hence cutting the costs run up by clubs in assembling and remunerating their playing staff would result in lower prices for the everyday punter and/or increased investment in youth development, it might be a cause worth backing. But that is not how the brutal logic of the free market works. While demand for tickets outstrips supply, prices will tend to rise not fall. The money that used to be swallowed by agents, meanwhile, would more than likely pump yet more inflation into the transfer market or, at clubs not craving trophies or haunted by relegation, augment the rate of return enjoyed by owners.
The new regime is not yet a fait accompli: an agents’ body has lodged a complaint and a challenge on anti-competitive grounds with the European Commission. Chances are you will be hearing an increasing amount on the subject between now and April Fools’ day. When you do, it is perhaps worth reflecting on who stands to gain, as well as who stands to lose out, if the new rules do duly come into effect.
David Owen worked for 20 years for the Financial Times in the United States, Canada, France and the UK. He ended his FT career as sports editor after the 2006 World Cup and is now freelancing, including covering the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the 2010 World Cup and London 2012. Owen’s Twitter feed can be accessed at www.twitter.com/dodo938.