Football agents are walking a thin line, lambasted from all sides for taking money out of the national game. Allegations That a bung culture is rife have seen practitioners fight to be seen as a legitimate profession. Tabloid panic or a deep-rooted problem? Neil Tague finds out
Sports agents are one of the great bogeymen of the modern-day tabloid. Football club chairmen and fans alike are always happy to blame the "Mr Ten Per Cents" who are dragging the game inexorably towards hell in a handcart - usually when their team has lost a star player.In January Mike Newell, manager of Luton Town FC, unguardedly said in a speech that "a lot of people involved with agents and doing the deals are taking backhanders" - an offhand comment that has left the North West's leading agents engaged in a battle to be seen as a legitimate profession. Are agents destined to be football's bad guys?
"We do have to take a certain amount of heat," says Jonathan Barnett, chairman of Stellar Group, which with over 260 English-based players is the country's largest agency. "But the problem I have is that the coverage never looks to explain about what an agent does and what they're there for. It's an easy bandwagon to jump on."
There has to be more to the story. If agents were the pointless drain on the game that certain pundits claim, the professional game would have cottoned on long since and cut them loose. As it is, Manchester United spent £32.2m on agents fees in the last financial year. And the number of FIFA- registered agents in the UK has rocketed from 70 to over 300 in the last seven years.
Robert Stoker, intellectual property partner at Manchester law firm Ricksons, says a lot of good work goes unnoticed. "Do agents justify their fees? A lot of them do," he says. "You have to be aware that some of the clients take an awful lot of looking after. That's where a good agent comes into their own."
Barnett says that no effort is made to distinguish between givers and takers. "The main issue is people don't take the trouble to differentiate between those who look after players and those who don't," he says. "We look after our players, they have proper advice on wealth management and legal issues. We look after phone and electricity bills if needed. We have 40 people in contact every day with our players."
Tabloid scare stories are all about keeping it simple, and Barnett reckons that's part of the problem in perceptions of agents. "It's like journalism or any business - one guy does politics, another guy does sports. Different agents do different things," he says. "There are guys out there running round doing deals who don't act for players and don't have the long-term interest of any player in mind, but agents generally are an easy target."
He also feels a lot of the negative publicity is down to clubs. "Why do clubs sign players and train them from the age of ten? It's not because of a social conscience or to keep them off the streets, it's because it's the cheapest way to get players," he says.
"When they discard them it's obvious that the lovey-dovey stuff about being close to players is complete rubbish. None of them ring to ask after them once they've left. Our job is to look after our players. We're not good Samaritans - we make a very good living - but we don't do a deal and run away."
Fintan Drury, chief executive of Platinum One, an Irish sports management and representation business with a Manchester office. He believes the problems run deep.
"Professional football is corrupt in lots of different ways and at some point agents have to stop blaming clubs and clubs stop blaming agents. It's got to come from within - Mike Newell has helped because he's created debate."