Sala tragedy should lead to change in transfer rules
Details of striker’s sale should encourage the authorities to bring back regulations on sales
Emiliano Sala was buried on Saturday in his hometown of Progreso in Argentina. Among the mourners were Cardiff City chief executive Ken Choo, manager Neil Warnock and Willie Mckay who brokered Sala’s £15million move to the Premier League club.
Brokered is the right word because one of the crucial issues highlighted by the tragedy, in which Sala and pilot David Ibbotson died in the Piper Malibu plane that crashed into the English Channel on Jan 21, is the nature of transfer deals and how they come about. A light has been shone on this business.
Prior to the tragedy Fifa has already been examining how best it can re-introduce regulations and licensing on agents – stupidly abandoned in 2015 – and measures are being discussed.
These include capping fees at either five per cent or even three per cent (at present agents can potentially receive unlimited commission), ending “dual representation” whereby an agent can act for a club and a player in the same deal, and introducing a “clearing house” for cross-border transfers.
All are sensible and longoverdue measures, as is reintroducing an exam so agents actually have to qualify as “intermediaries”, rather than simply show they do not have a criminal record.
But what also needs to be dealt with is what is known in the industry as “brokerage” – the practice in which an agent, or rather a broker as they are termed, lives for the deal. His livelihood depends on the deal, on the buying and selling of players and moving them.
There is nothing illegal in this. But brokers are largely not interested in being player agents; in representing a player in the long-term. They want to create a market and get a transfer deal done. That is it. Mckay is a self-confessed broker.
“We are not interested in personal affairs; finances, holidays, baby-sitting, that is not our business,” Mckay wrote by way of introducing himself to Sala, explaining how he would get the 28-year-old striker a big-money move from French club Nantes to the Premier League. Even though he had never met him. Mercato Sports, the company run by Mckay’s son Mark, was given the mandate by Nantes to sell Sala.
What Mckay is about is making “transfers!” (his exclamation mark).
“We approached Nantes, as we do with many players in other clubs, to obtain the mandate of sale,” Mckay explained and he was candid in the emails he subsequently released in his attempt to set the record straight.
“We do not say ‘we are like a father to a son to our players’. No, if you had not been a footballer, these people would not be interested in you. In the end, they are only interested in the money. What we all want a lot of, of course. That’s why we like to work with just the clubs. No sentiment, we’re just doing business.”
No sentiment, we’re just doing business. That line should not be forgotten. It should draw a line under brokerage; under the type of agent whose interests appear to lie primarily in the movement of players rather than the management of their careers – and there is a distinction.
What really needs to happen is a fundamental change in the way in which clubs conduct their business and it should not be beyond the leagues around the world to, for example, follow the practice set in Germany where an agent cannot even go through the front door of a club without being armed with a copy of a player’s passport and a representation contract.
The business that has to stop is simple: clubs should not mandate agents to conduct the sale of players. If a club wants to buy or sell a player they should deal directly with the other club or that player’s agent. Not someone who has come in at the 11th hour, who has often never even met the player, and is touting the deal around, not necessarily in the player’s best interests, and whose involvement often ends when the move happens.
It would be a small comfort if the Sala tragedy actually forced clubs and the governing bodies into considering more carefully how they conduct their business, the way in which transfers happen and to make a change.
They do not need to mandate others to do their business for them and they do need to have a far greater care of duty to the players in the first place.