SPECIAL AGENT
FOOTBALL’S DEAL-MAKER
JON SMITH — self-proclaimed “first of the football super-agents” — is much in demand as a talking head, pontificating for TV and radio on the state of the market. As he well knows, it is all good publicity for his new biography, published a week after the August 31 transfer deadline day to avoid the media frenzy and thus maximise promotional opportunities.
We meet for a late breakfast, at the Village Hotel in Elstree, incorpo- rating the fitness club of choice for many of the local Jewish community. Trim, tanned, and attired in a sweat-top, ripped jeans and trainers, the 64-year-old north Londoner has already worked out at his home gym and is in need of some comfort food.
It is actually past serving time but Smith charms the waitress, earning extra brownie points for rushing to scoop up the contents of a basket of condiment sachets she knocks onto the floor. “It’s worth 30 per cent off the bill,” he laughs.
In conversation, as well as in the book, he has plentiful celebrity names to drop. He starts with J K Rowling, or at least her agent, Neil Blair, who he says phoned to congratulate him for defending Israel as a Sky News paper reviewer during the Gaza conflict. One thing led to another and, within a few weeks, the book deal had been agreed with Rowling’s publisher.
Down the years, Smith has received many offers to dig the dirt but prefers to focus on being, “part of the revolution of English football, now the biggest entertainment on the planet. It also deals with my cock-ups, of which there have been many.”
One not in the book is the request from a sportswear company to advise on a youth footballer to be the focal point of a major campaign. The options were England schoolboys captain Tommy Caton and promising young midfielder David Beckham.
“I looked at both and said: ‘Go with Tommy Caton’.” He has never lived it down.
Cock-ups notwithstanding, he has been an innovator within his field through the First Artist company, having overcome personal tragedy and disability. His mother died from lung cancer when he was 15; his first wife, Lee, died from leukaemia four years after they married.
As a child, he was afflicted by a crippling stammer. “I promised Mum, in halting English, that I would make her proud. I had some success in my own small way as a junior athlete [he represented England as a sprinter]. We were very close. She was my translator.”
Smith was cured of his stammer at 17 after a scarily extreme “tough love” therapy course, which would doubtless be outlawed today. It also provided him with life skills and mannerisms which have proved invaluable during tense negotiations.
For example, “look at the bridge of the nose of the person you are talking to, use pauses and never blink”, he says giving a convincing demonstration. He is a patron of the British Stammering Association and lists “early testing to help cure 90 per cent of the world’s stammerers” as his remaining ambition.
His first business venture was a music company named MEI in the unrealised hope that people would confuse it with EMI. A subsequent venture fared better, being in the vanguard of the Northern Soul boom. Two days
I said to Mum I’d make her proud’