A viable alternative to the greedy agent?
The fallout continues regarding Wayne Rooney’s new contract at Manchester United. A topsy-turvy week for Manchester United fans saw England international Wayne Rooney agree terms for a new deal that will keep him at the club until 2015 and be worth a rumoured (and grotesque) £250,000 a week. Despite getting his man and winning a hard-fought battle, Sir Alex Ferguson is still mulling over the long-term implications for game. The culture of greed prevalent throughout football is spreading and as players become more and more powerful, so to do the agents that encourage this negative behaviour and suck money out of the game.
Ferguson was asked by Sky Sports if he believed from the start that Rooney would stay with Manchester United and he had this to say: “Not necessarily no, because although you know the player you don’t know his agent. Agents live in their pockets nowadays and for some reason they have an influence on the players which I think is a big change in the game as far as I’m concerned.”
These are people with no interest in giving back. Their very existence sucks money from the game – they are football’s leaches – they plunder, manipulate and brainwash their clients and try to secure the biggest deals possible, often to the detriment of the club who had nurtured and raised that player through good times and bad.
Rooney’s agent, Paul Stretford is the target of a lot of fan and media ire at the moment. Though, if Rooney’s deal is worth what it’s said to be worth, you doubt he’ll care too much. Stretford and Rooney’s engineered one of the greatest acts of manipulation in living memory upon a club and it’s Manchester United and in turn, Manchester United fans that suffer as a result. Stretford is the kind of man who will do anything to make himself and his clients rich – no, not just rich, preposterously and disgustingly wealthy.
Something is wrong when there’s room in the game for characters like Stretford to siphon money away from clubs into their own personal accounts. This is not to say that every agent is a scourge upon the game, but you can hardly say that as a body, agents represent a force for good. This raises the question – is there a system in which the rights and interests of players can be fought for and protected without the use of independent agents?
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To assess whether the game needs agents, we must first assess what role these agents play within the game. The most important role of an agent is to look after player’s financial interests. This frees the player up to concentrate solely on football without having to worry about negotiating new deals and the like. The agent will also help guide the player’s public relationship and develop the player as a product and geared towards making money. In return the agent receives a cut of all the players’ earnings, usually between 5-10%.
Do we really need these self-interested individuals to be part of the game? Fair enough if a player wants to develop his own brand and engineer lucrative promotional deals – but should these agents be dealing with clubs and have such power when it comes to negotiating new deals? My response is no – so what’s the alternative? The trouble is that we’re traversing relatively new ground here. With no agents, there would have to be an independent body that oversaw all transfer and contract negotiations to ensure that each side receives their fair share.
Such a body could end up being a bureaucratic nightmare. It would require an unending list of regulations to ensure that the manipulation and greed common amongst agents does not spread. How would this body calculate exactly what each player was worth? What happens when a club disagrees with the independent body’s evaluation, does the player get left by the wayside? Can this body really be expected to look after a players interest when it has no real (monetary) motivation to do so? How does this body keep afloat – does it receive a set payment from the club for each deal secured? Does it vary according to the stature of the player? Or should it be players who have to pay to utilise the services of an independent body?
These are difficult but important questions with no simple answer. Almost every club has a sob-story regarding agents who were able to use their position to earn more money than necessary for themselves and their client. The difficulty is that the alternative seems almost as far-fetched. Yet regulated systems such as these are not impossible. Given the whole Wayne Rooney palaver I think it’s time we start thinking seriously about the answers to the above questions and begin to imagine a world in players which agents are stripped of their power over the game.
What’s your take? Is it time to rid the game of agents?
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