I've just come across this series on Yahoo. We all know the general consensus on the majority of agents but this is interesting nonetheless. A PL manager asking for a cut and so on.
SECRET AGENT:
With the transfer window shut, two managers asked me last week if I was going to take a holiday with all my free time. I think they assume that as soon as the window closes, I fly to a Caribbean island and count the money I’ve made. The reality is different. The window was not a good one for my company. We still have three players for whom we didn’t manage to find clubs, all of them internationals. They’ve been out of contract since June 30th and I’ve been trying to get them suitable clubs all summer with no joy.
I’ve called clubs two or three times in case their circumstances changed or if they had an injured player. By the third time, some clubs weren’t even picking the phone up. One manager did and said: “You’ve already tried to sell him to be twice, what makes you think I’ll buy him the third time?” I was hoping for third time lucky but it wasn’t to be. God loves a trier.
We were close to doing a deal for one player and agreed personal terms, but then the club changed their minds. That was a blow. Another player signed a pre-contract for a club who were then hit with a transfer embargo.
Another blow. In the UK, the changes in immigration law caused us a problem. A player used to be able to get a work permit if he had played 75% of competitive games in the last two years for a country ranked in FIFA’s top 70 countries. That has now been changed to top 50 and that hit us. You can appeal and you get points if a transfer is involved or if a contract has been agreed. All we had was a trial lined up. Our lawyer told us we had no chance.
We only agreed to represent the third player at the start of August. We don’t normally take a player on so late, but he’s best friends with one of our biggest players in the Premier League so we felt obliged. Unfortunately, he’s not as good as the player in the Premier League. We’ll keep trying.
Your players start to question you too. They wonder why you haven’t got them a club but they don’t realise how tough the market is, how there are too many players and too many agents. The parents can’t understand why you haven’t sold their very own Lionel Messi either. One player told me what I was doing wrong. I told him that if he was so certain, then he should sell himself rather than pay me to do it. I actually had him a good club, but it wasn’t good enough for his enlarged ego. That’s another problem – expectation and reality.
So now we start again. I’ll begin travelling to see clubs in a couple of weeks, to see what players they are looking for in January. I’ll see my players too in their various countries around Europe and we want to start working in some other countries. We’ve done well in England, Spain, America, Holland and Belgium. But it’s almost impossible to be an agent in France, Italy, Russia or Turkey unless you have someone with influence there. And that’s where the lines between legitimate clean business and people accepting bribes start to blur.
England is pretty clean, though as I was about to sell one player to a big Premier League club, I received a call from a heavy agent who told me that he was in on the deal. I told him that he wasn’t. He made it clear that the deal wouldn’t happen if he wasn’t cut in on a considerable commission. Which is another way of saying that he was the manager’s man and the manager was taking a cut. The manager could have easily called the deal off.
As well as working to find our remaining players a club, our company needs to have a meeting to see what went wrong in the window for us. We’ve done well in the last ten years but we had a bad summer and, just like any company, we need to find out why, find out which new players we need to sign up, in which countries and in which positions. Hopefully things will be looking more optimistic by the time of the next column.
https://uk.sports.yahoo.com/news/secret-agent-post-transfer-window-211146382.html
SECRET AGENT:
With the transfer window shut, two managers asked me last week if I was going to take a holiday with all my free time. I think they assume that as soon as the window closes, I fly to a Caribbean island and count the money I’ve made. The reality is different. The window was not a good one for my company. We still have three players for whom we didn’t manage to find clubs, all of them internationals. They’ve been out of contract since June 30th and I’ve been trying to get them suitable clubs all summer with no joy.
I’ve called clubs two or three times in case their circumstances changed or if they had an injured player. By the third time, some clubs weren’t even picking the phone up. One manager did and said: “You’ve already tried to sell him to be twice, what makes you think I’ll buy him the third time?” I was hoping for third time lucky but it wasn’t to be. God loves a trier.
We were close to doing a deal for one player and agreed personal terms, but then the club changed their minds. That was a blow. Another player signed a pre-contract for a club who were then hit with a transfer embargo.
Another blow. In the UK, the changes in immigration law caused us a problem. A player used to be able to get a work permit if he had played 75% of competitive games in the last two years for a country ranked in FIFA’s top 70 countries. That has now been changed to top 50 and that hit us. You can appeal and you get points if a transfer is involved or if a contract has been agreed. All we had was a trial lined up. Our lawyer told us we had no chance.
We only agreed to represent the third player at the start of August. We don’t normally take a player on so late, but he’s best friends with one of our biggest players in the Premier League so we felt obliged. Unfortunately, he’s not as good as the player in the Premier League. We’ll keep trying.
Your players start to question you too. They wonder why you haven’t got them a club but they don’t realise how tough the market is, how there are too many players and too many agents. The parents can’t understand why you haven’t sold their very own Lionel Messi either. One player told me what I was doing wrong. I told him that if he was so certain, then he should sell himself rather than pay me to do it. I actually had him a good club, but it wasn’t good enough for his enlarged ego. That’s another problem – expectation and reality.
So now we start again. I’ll begin travelling to see clubs in a couple of weeks, to see what players they are looking for in January. I’ll see my players too in their various countries around Europe and we want to start working in some other countries. We’ve done well in England, Spain, America, Holland and Belgium. But it’s almost impossible to be an agent in France, Italy, Russia or Turkey unless you have someone with influence there. And that’s where the lines between legitimate clean business and people accepting bribes start to blur.
England is pretty clean, though as I was about to sell one player to a big Premier League club, I received a call from a heavy agent who told me that he was in on the deal. I told him that he wasn’t. He made it clear that the deal wouldn’t happen if he wasn’t cut in on a considerable commission. Which is another way of saying that he was the manager’s man and the manager was taking a cut. The manager could have easily called the deal off.
As well as working to find our remaining players a club, our company needs to have a meeting to see what went wrong in the window for us. We’ve done well in the last ten years but we had a bad summer and, just like any company, we need to find out why, find out which new players we need to sign up, in which countries and in which positions. Hopefully things will be looking more optimistic by the time of the next column.
https://uk.sports.yahoo.com/news/secret-agent-post-transfer-window-211146382.html
