By Paul Nicholson
February 3 – FIFA’s consultation process over its proposed football agent regulations has been called a “pantomime”, “fake” and a distortion “of the reality of a process which is far away from being genuine or robust”.
The comments were made by by Jonathan Barnett (pictured), board member of The Football Forum, and founder of the ICM Stellar Sports agency.
The Football Forum is the largest grouping of football agent associations in Europe with all of the major football markets represented and accounting for probably more than 80% of the value of transfer deals done.
Barnett says that the Football Forum has not been included in any consultation and questions the validity of the agent organisations FIFA met with during its two-day summit.
“Look at the timing of the meeting, holding it two days before the end of the transfer season. What agent has time to take two days out when they should be working for their players,” said Barnett.
“These are Walter Mitty agents (that FIFA is talking to). If any of these guys can come and talk to me and tell me how they work and who they represent then I’ll retract that comment,” he continued.
FIFA said that it has gone through the key points in the current draft regulations with major agents organisations including the Unión de Agentes Intermediarios de Fútbol de América, the Professional Football Agents Association, the African Football Agents Association and the Asian Football Agents Association.
A number of player agents have contacted Insideworldfootball saying that they had never heard of these associations, prompting speculation that they are “made-up” organisations.
Regulation of player agents is a hot topic, with fees agents earn always the biggest public issue.
Barnett says that agents have no issue with being regulated. “We are not against it,” said Barnett. “We 100% want proper regulation and want to be involved in the process (of agreeing that regulation).”
“Not one member of FIFA has been in my offices or any of the big agencies to see what we do,” said Barnett. “They (FIFA) don’t know what we do. So how can anyone allow them to make up the rules to govern our business? How can that be right?”
“They say they look after players but they don’t. Ask any player,” said Barnett.
“We told FIFA we are aware of what they are doing and invited them on many occasions to reconsider their position and start a proper consultation process, but they preferred to ignore us, since the decision on how they intend to regulate agents was taken long before their fake consultations had even started,” said Barnett.
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