£1.5 BILLION JUST TO AGENTS!

The incredible amount paid out in only six years ... so, as race to seal deals pushes up prices before end of transfer window, just who benefits most?

ANOTHER window of record spending in the Premier League will bring another record windfall in rake-offs for agents, who have taken a staggering £1.5 billion from the English game alone over the past six years.

That jaw-dropping figure has been calculated by The Mail on Sunday using official figures produced by the Football Association, the Premier League and the Football League, and from conservative estimates of agent commissions on player contracts.

To put it into some perspective, approximately 2,500 first-team footballers at the 92 clubs in England’s top four divisions have earned around £ 10bn since 2011.

So the agents collectively — hundreds of them, albeit with a few handfuls of big agencies and ‘super agents’ dominating — have earned 15 per cent of that just for moving those players around and getting them the best contracts possible.

The £1.5bn breaks down into slightly more than £1bn in payments made to agents by clubs, as disclosed annually by football’s governing bodies (see the panel, right), and slightly less than £ 500 million in typical five per cent slices of player wages.

The most recently available official fi gures for agent payments from October 2015 to September 2016 showed the Premier League clubs alone spent £174m in that period, while the Football League’s 72 clubs spent £46m.

Those sums are forecast to jump above £200m and to around £50m when next disclosed, taking in this summer’s activity.

Some agents have become famous in their own right — none more so than Jorge Mendes, agent to Jose Mourinho and Cristiano Ronaldo among others, and Mino Raiola, whose client list includes Manchester United quartet Romelu Lukaku, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Paul Pogba and Henrikh Mkhitaryan. But a Mail on Sunday analysis of work by agents for October 2015 to September 2016 in England — when paid by clubs — highlights various other major agencies. The Wasserman group ( 56 transactions in the top two divisions in the period), Stellar Group (53) and Base Soccer ( 45) were busiest and are profiled on these pages.

Wasserman’s cli ent l i st i ncludes Everton manager Ronald Koeman and a group of Everton players. Stellar and Base each have groups of players at one or more of Arsenal, Tottenham, Swansea and Southampton.

Among other prolific brokers are Unique Sports Management (38 transactions in the period reviewed, Harry Kane is a client), New Era (29 deals, Ashley Williams is a client and Rio Ferdinand their biggest former player), Key Sports (29 deals, Theo Walcott and Jamie Vardy are on their books), and Impact Sports (26 deals, Dele Alli is a client, for now).

The policing of agents was effectively deregulated in April 2015, when it no longer became necessary to pass an FA test to get a licence.

Registered agent numbers in England soared from 550 to 1,500, as Base Soccer boss Leon Angel even noted in his f i rm’s f i nancial accounts registered a t Companies House. ‘ However this does not appear to have affected our business,’ he writes.

It seems there remains plenty of money to go around.