10 PERCENT CAP WON’T FIT HEADS OF AGENTS GROWN BIG ON GREED
WHILE football wonders how it is going to get through the latest pandemic surge, the game’s super-agents have more weighty issues on their minds.
They are plotting a way to counter FIFA’s dastardly move to cap their slice of a transfer fee at 10 percent.
Which is a bit ironic, considering they were often known as the Mr Ten Percents. Those days are long gone. Infamously, Mino Raiola made £41.39million from Paul Pogba’s £89.3m move to Manchester United back in 2016.
Huge commissions are not just confined to Premier League business.
One deal highlighted by FIFA last week involved an unnamed agent receiving 118 p*ercent of the transfer fee paid by a German club to a French club.
In other words, if that fee was £10m, the agent also got £11.8m.
But most of what the Germans refer to as ‘stupid money’ comes from the Premier League and EFL.
According to FIFA, £378m was paid across football to agents in 2021.
English clubs paid £101m, while next on the list was Germany, with £64m.
In case you were not aware, agents do not just take a payment for getting a player to sign for a club – and that can be particularly sizable if it is a free transfer – they take payments for contracts.
So, if Player X signs a deal worth £30m over three years, the agent demands a percentage payment on top.
FIFA want to cap that payment at three percent,
which sounds pretty reasonable to me, but it won’t to the likes of Raiola (below).
Some super-agents actually charge what they like to call an ‘access fee’, which they receive in exchange for merely allowing a club to negotiate with a player and his representative. It is not conditional on a player signing.
The figures are truly mindboggling and some people thought they would diminish in light of the pandemic.
Not at all. That £378m figure is slightly higher than the 2020 figure, even though the amount spent on transfer fees was slightly less.
There were 117 transfers in 2021 from which an agent pocketed a fee in excess of £760,000.
I’ve said it before on numerous occasions and will say it again, those who say this is of no real concern to the average football supporter are fundamentally wrong.
The clubs who pay these exorbitant amounts to intermediaries have to recoup that cash. And they recoup it from YOU, one way or the other, directly or indirectly.
Directly from ticket prices, indirectly from merchandise sales and TV subscriptions.
And that is why FIFA’s regulatory initiative over agents’ fees – trying to clamp down on what they call ‘excessive and abusive practices’ – should have our full support.
And the full support of all the national associations.
This should be a war FIFA wage until the bitter end.
Predictably, the super-agents will explore every legal option open to them to resist the ‘ten percent’ regulations.
For the good of the game, let’s hope they fail.