Football needs to act now. The game is sleepwalking towards a crisis over agents

I wanted to do an article on this subject immediately after transfer deadline day two weeks ago. That left me simmering with frustration at the level of panic that ensues and the amount of money being thrown around.

Instead, I decided to give myself time to reflect rather than just make a knee-jerk reaction. But at some point you have to speak out when you sense a situation is running out of control.

My views about agents are fairly well known. I’ve criticised them before. But I feel their influence in recent years has grown to a level that means football needs to act to address the situation and find ways to curb their influence.

Let’s start with the positives. There are good agents. Every player needs advice at some stage and young ones might need representation, although I would direct them to a contract lawyer and a financial adviser, professionals who charge by the hour rather than someone who takes a percentage of your salary or a fixed fee. Some players of a certain level of fame might even need a commercial agent who can schmooze potential sponsors and bring in corporate backers. All those people deserve a fee and earn their money.



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But it concerns me when I see teenagers making a decision to switch clubs apparently on the basis of a bigger pay packet — which, of course, is in the agent’s interest — rather than work their passage into the first team.

It concerns me when I see players who hand over every aspect of their life to an agent, from renting a house to buying a television, to discussing with the manager why he has been dropped. How does he expect to grow up without making mistakes and dealing with those issues himself?

It concerns me that there is a lack of transparency around football finances that means sometimes it is not clear who the agent is working for: the club, the player or the manager? It concerns me that who gets paid what, and where it all ends up, isn’t always clear, especially in global transactions.

It concerns me that there are agents who will hang around youth football matches, offering cash inducements to parents and promises to boys to gain an influence over them. It concerns me that there are corporate companies that will buy up stakes in young players and then offer investors the chance of a return on the money made in the transfer market on them, the so-called third-party ownerships banned in English football but common elsewhere.

None of this feels right. In some ways, I’m not the best person to make this point. I stayed at the same club for 20 years and I never had to look for a move. I do understand that some players need help to find a new club or to be represented. But I’ve never understood why a mature player would need to pay someone to ask for a pay rise.

The idea of a grown man, who knows the going rate, not being able to say how much he thinks he should be paid baffles me. I don’t understand any player who would hand over financial affairs to someone who has only come along when they’ve made a success of themselves. As a player, I would want to sit in every meeting over my contract. For one thing, it means I know exactly what is going on and I couldn’t be misrepresented. For another, it would improve my life and skills: it’s an opportunity to educate yourself. And as a simple point of negotiation, it’s a lot harder for a chief executive to tell a player to his face that he’s not willing to give you the money you think you’re worth.

But it is the role of agents beyond their dealings with players that concerns me most. Why should it be necessary for a chief executive to use an agent to contact a colleague at another club to ask whether they are willing to sell a player? Surely one executive is capable of picking up the phone to another and having a conversation?

Act now: UEFA president Michel Platini (left) and FIFA counterpart Sepp Blatter must curb the power of agents

It concerns me that if you’re an aspiring manager you might feel you have to pick a certain agent to get offered a job by clubs. And if you do go down that route, what will your response be when the agent who got you the job suggests that you buy one of his players? You would have to be confident in your ability to survive to say No. How did owners come to rely on agents to have such influence on these decisions in the first place? Surely they’re capable of doing their own research and making their own decisions?

Agents now influence players, owners and executives. Sometimes they are richer and more powerful than those they’re advising. And not many journalists will write about their activities because agents also provide the stories that drive sales, website hits and Twitter followers, so they end up influencing the media as well.

My concern is that, just as the banking sector was allowed to run rampant over the last 20 years with little regulation which led to an unjustifiable culture, football could be heading the same way.

I don’t have answers to the problem but it needs to be discussed. Two steps could be taken to improve transparency.



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Firstly, publish the wages of players, as they do in the US sports, so there is no mystique about salaries. Secondly, as well as publishing how much a club spend on agents — as the Football League and Premier League do every year — break down those fees to the individual agents and their companies. Let’s see which agents and clubs share an especially close relationship. Neither suggestion would solve all the issues but they would provide a degree of transparency.

But all of football — the League Managers Association, the Professional Footballers’ Association, the Premier League, the FA, UEFA and most of all FIFA, the ultimate regulators of agents — need to address these problems because there are a lot of good people in football who are bemused as to how these agents came to have so much power.

The Government seems to set up an inquiry into something most days of the week, but football could really do with an independent inquiry into how agents influence the game. And then come up with some proposals as to how to regulate their role.

Plenty of good agents, who do their business the right way, would welcome that opportunity to expose bad practice. Because if people don’t start speaking up on the issue, my fear is football will be found to have fallen asleep during its own equivalent of the banking crisis.

Maybe Wenger should follow Jose’s lead

I wonder if Arsene Wenger might have taken a look at Jose Mourinho’s tactics in the last 20 minutes against Manchester United and play it a little safe at home to Bayern Munich.



It was interesting to see last Wednesday that when Robin van Persie had a late chance to make it 2-1, Mourinho brought on Pepe and Luka Modric to shore up his side.



The importance of not conceding at home is paramount. If Arsenal can stay in this tie, with the pace of Theo Walcott and Lukas Podolski they may be better-placed to win away on the counter-attack.

No way through: Robin van Persie was well shackled on Wednesday night, with Sami Khedira sticking the boot in here

Hailing the heroes at grass-root level



Amid all the excitement over the Champions League games, the Premier League title race and the speculation over which players your club might sign, we all know football’s lifeblood is provided by the hundreds of thousands of volunteers who coach teams, run leagues, put up nets and drive minibuses week in, week out.



That’s why I’ve got involved this year in the FA Community Awards, presented by McDonald’s. The idea is to recognise those unsung heroes of the game who sustain football’s grassroots.