AGENT FOR CHANGE

By Howard Borrell

Here at Chesterfield we try our level best to avoid paying fees to agents, our only concession being if we've genuinely had a good service done on our behalf. A lot of fans think that agents play very little part in the workings of lower division clubs, unfortunately that's not the case, they're everywhere! Even non-league players feel they are important and ill-advised enough to have an agent.

Possibly we can survive the sweeping tide of agent involvement if we maintain our stance but the higher echelons of football look to have already capitulated. A newspaper snippet last month prompted this article - the Real Madrid president, Florentino Perez announced that any new coach would need to know the mediaticamente of his players. There is no literal translation but broadly it means that the manager, whichever stooge that may be, would have to evaluate the cultural and commercial worth of the players before he picked the team. Those same players will have cost an inflated fee because they've been horse traded around Europe to maximise the benefit to the agent and the more the club pays for a player the more the likes of Real Madrid feel they've got to play the player.

Sam Allardyce, the worker of miracles at Bolton, said recently he'd like to manage Real Madrid - I'm not sure such a job exists anymore. Only in England are managers allowed to manage but even that involves managing the mischief of agents.

The agent of Ruud Van Nistelrooy is still receiving instalment payments as a result of his part in the transfer three years ago; a cynical person might think that such payments are to stop him touting the player around the richest European clubs. Manchester United are currently being praised for their transparency in admitting to £5.5m agent expenditure in last year alone. When you consider that works out at a £3 levy per match ticket sold Old Trafford you start to get an idea of the insanity of it all. I can understand Steve Gibson having to pay agents to attract quality players to Middlesbrough but I can't understand why - when the world's top players would crawl over hot coals to sign for United - such payments are necessary at Manchester . Imagine being paid £5,000 per week for six years just for introducing Wayne Rooney to United - David Gill, United's Chief Executive, amazingly considers it all money well spent, then again he's be out of a well paid job if this practice ended.

The more transparent football gets the more opaque its customs become. Let's remember transparency only occurred at Old Trafford because the Irish race horse owners Magnier and McManus compiled 99 demands as a means of winning their battle with Sir Alex. Now resolved they look set to pocket a nice £70m share profit.

The 72 Football League clubs have already published the first set of figures showing how much they paid in agents fees last year, and will do the same every season. A Couple of months ago the 20 Premiership clubs agreed that their annual reports will include details of payments to agents and third parties and report to the league all deals in which £25,000 is paid to any agent. Cynically I now expect many  payments of £24,999.

The Football Association are drawing up some new regulations to help bolster the rules of FIFA that will hopefully govern agents' activities. The F.A.'s moves are intended to ensure disclosure of payments to other third parties and also key relationships between agents, managers and chairmen. For example it would reveal the people that hold shares in a football agency and therefore stand to benefit by the buying or selling of a player. A clear conflict of interest but one that is believed to be widespread and very hard to unearth.

It's a little like I doubted that wage levels (in our division) would ever drop to something like manageable - but they have and Chesterfield must maintain its strong line on agents and hope that other clubs follow if we are ever to lessen the murkiness of football that allows Pini Zahavi, a close friend of the Chelsea owner, to pull in over £5m for arranging several transfers to the West London club. Nice work if you can get it!