Agents fees 2011/2012 exceed £77m; an Untold review « Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News. 800,000 visits last month

Written by Adam Brogden

Agents fees 2011/2012

Below we have the recently released fees paid by premier league clubs to football agents, I do not know if this includes exempt persons.

This table reflects monies paid to agents by clubs, not monies paid by players to agents but does include monies paid by clubs to agents on behalf of players.

It amazes me that this amount of money gets no media attention yet if a club spends a fraction of this £77million it is plastered all over the papers. Read what you want in to the figures of each club but please consider this first; the above money is leaving football. So from your season ticket, TV subscription, sponsorship deal, merchandise straight to the pocket of an agent/solicitor.

What this money is paid out for are services rendered in contract negotiation or renegotiation for incoming or outgoing players, loan contracts and first contracts. So all in all we can safely state that this money is going to the solicitors or agents that go in at contract level.

A football agent or exempt solicitor can represent both parties in a transfer/loan so could be getting paid twice for the same transfer or even three times if negotiating a permanent transfer between two clubs and the players contract. What the table above omits is any agreement between the player and his agent.

The only way to find out how much a player pays his agent is through the transfer matching system which requires this information, but this system only deals with international transfers.

Disclosure within the football industry is a major factor in fans’ distrust of the people involved in the sport.  We in England can count ourselves lucky as our football, although with its problems does not face the same issues as the continental or South American game. Third party player ownership is on the increase and soon I believe we will hear calls for a register or some form of disclosure as to who owns a player’s transfer rights not just a percentage logged on TMS.

Can you imagine how disgruntled some Arsenal fans would be if we hadsold Robin Van Persie this season only to find out we did not own his future transfer rights so got nothing of the £25million or so that Manchester United paid. That is the possible scenario at some clubs outside of France and England especially in Portugal.

You may even find out in the future that we were out-bid by Manchester United on Cristiano Ronaldo due to Gestifute wanting maximum profit from their interest in the players future transfer rights as Wenger stated before “You’ll have to ask Cristiano how close I was to signing him”.

The latest player that we had to buy off of a club and a third party was Andre Santos and I believe we have had many players recruited like this. Moving over to Germany we have clubs in the mould of Bayer Leverkusen who are owned by a parent corporation who can also indulge in TPPO (third party player ownership), and I believe they sponsor their own players personally as well?

So competition wise we are up against it, not only do we compete with Chelsea and Manchester city, we have to compete with the corporations and investment funds. The above table will not show you how much money Premier league clubs have spent on recruiting players from third parties that information is not available.

What you can be sure of, is the £77million above is just the tip of the monetary iceberg that agents and third party investment funds earn out of the game each year. Money from you and I straight to their pockets.  UEFA are considering a total ban on the registering third party owned or partly owned players from their competitions which I believe would hit football harder than FFPR.