December 15 – Player agents fees reached a record $881.million in 2023, a massive 42.5% increase in the $623.2 million paid to agents in 2022. The previous record for agents fees was set in 2019 ($654.7 million).
Whichever way you look at it, it is a huge amount of money generated within football but moving outside the game to a small group of people, and it doesn’t look about to stop.
FIFA’s new agency rules propose regulating player agents and capping transfer fees at 10% and limiting the commissions to 3% of a player’s salary when those earnings are more than $200,000 per year, or 5% when the player earns up to $200,000. Those limits would be 6% and 10%, respectively, when the agent acted for both the player and the club signing them.
However, a number of court rulings in cases challenging the implementation of the rules have been won by the agents, rendering FIFA’s rules unenforceable in a number of key markets.
The latest court ruling to do so, and the most significant, was in the UK at the beginning of December in a case brought by a group of Britain’s biggest player agencies, including CAA Stellar and ICM.
FIFA’s latest agent fees data from its International Transfers Report, shows that English clubs paid more than $280 million to agents – almost a third of the total spend on agents globally.
If FIFA is being prevented by civil law from regulating the agency business and fees paid in the biggest transfer markets, the question then becomes how the implementation of the rules would impact other countries. The concern is that if the rules are not universally applied then they inadvertently sway competitive balance in favour of the jurisdictions where FIFA is unable to regulate.
Quite simply, the agents who control the players will obviously push them towards the markets where they can earn the biggest fees.
While England heads the fee-paying countries, Europe dominates with 86.6% of global spending on club agents. European clubs employed 86.6% of all engaging-club agents and 82.6% of all releasing-club agents.
Saudi Arabian clubs had the second-biggest spending on engaging-club agents at $86 million. Korea Republic had the greatest share of outgoing transfers with a releasing-club agent, with 31.6%.
All this at a time when FIFA data shows the number of international transfers with an agent acting on behalf of the player reached a record total of 3,353 transfers in 2023.
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