Even in this time of crisis, agents remain shameless
IT’S a crowded field but perhaps the most risible intervention in the stand-off between clubs and players this week came from Dr Erkut Sogut.
He is the agent for Mesut Ozil and — leaving aside that in the current climate nobody should be allowed to call themselves doctor unless they wear a white coat and can fit a ventilator — negotiated Ozil’s £ 350,000- a- week deal at Arsenal.
Sogut said that agents should have been involved in the negotiations over wage cuts and deferments. He then demonstrated exactly what he would bring to the table.
‘I wouldn’t recommend agreeing a cut today, because I don’t know if tomorrow the league will be played,’ Sogut said. Well, thanks for the info, Doc, but we really have our full complement of people stuffing up the process with intransigence.
Strategists, mediators, moderators, those who can see a bigger picture, are welcome. Agents, not so much. Agents have never been readily confused with life’s problem-solvers, unless there’s a slice for them. And as no money can be siphoned from a deferral, this really isn’t their field of expertise.
Yet still agents are weighing in. Stijn Francis, representing Toby Alderweireld, delivered a consistently self-serving rationalisation in The Guardian in which, like Sogut, he appeared to blame the clubs for paying the wages he and other agents had demanded.
Seriously. Here’s Sogut: ‘Clubs are in trouble because they mismanage their finances. Some owners do not care if they lose £50million or £200m. They just want to win a trophy, and the club for them is a gaming centre, like PlayStation.’
And now Francis: ‘A lot of clubs do not have a financial cushion and face stress because they tend to overinvest in players in the transfer market.’
Shameless, isn’t it? No doubt if Arsenal season-ticket holders were asked to name the greatest mismanagement of finances in recent years the phrase ‘ 350 grand-a-week contract’ might be heard more than once.
Francis’s logic continues down the clubs- as- mugs path, too, peddling all the suspicion and spurious logic that has brought football to this impasse.
At one stage he argues if players help clubs with deferments, they will only use the saved money in the transfer market, replacing the very personnel who aided them in a crisis. Is this the advice he gives his clients? That any generosity will be used against them? Leeds players took a deferment and have been promised a two per cent wage increase when football returns, so how does that work?
‘Let us not forget in 2017-18 the Premier League clubs made a joint profit of around £ 285m before tax,’ Francis noted, piously. ‘None of the players got a part of these profits.’
No, they got humungous wages. Is that what the players would prefer? Lower basic and a profit-sharing scheme? The clubs would certainly agree. The figure Francis quotes works out as an
average £14.25m profit per club — before tax, do not forget. and each first-team squad has 25 players. are you all doing the maths here?
one imagines if players were relying on profit- sharing, the first expense to take a hit would be agents’ fees. Francis should be careful what he wishes for. Mino Raiola wouldn’t be getting £41m out of the Paul Pogba transfer if that money was coming from Pogba’s pocket. Fees like that are the sort of mad nonsense only executives do.
Francis’s conclusion is that the players who take a cut should be furloughed — which undermines his point about all the lovely tax going to the NHS — and would then be granted free transfers.
and who would that benefit? Step forward those selfless agents, now able to oversee a bidding war between rivals for their clients, no doubt with competing parties offering greater and greater incentives. Francis and his peers may have had to take cold showers after coming up with that one. is this really what the negotiations are missing? More self-interest? More one-dimensional viewpoints? Maybe save it for the difficult conversations coming up in July. That is when many of the commissions on contract negotiations are due — just at the point when cash flow at clubs is potentially reaching crisis levels if there is still no revenue stream. Some clubs are already warning that, without deferments or adjustments, they might not be able to meet those commitments.
Daniel Levy, at Tottenham, may even find this is one financial responsibility he can temporarily default on without attracting public opprobrium.
as for the agents, faced with banking a cheque from those reckless, spendthrift clubs or supporting clients in their fight for justice, no doubt they can be trusted to do what is right.