SPECIAL REPORT: FIFA bids to clean up 'wild west' culture among agents

On at least 10 occasions in recent years, an individual football agent has been paid at least £10m for his role in moving a player between one European club and another, a Mail on Sunday investigation has found, with £5m-plus commissions twice as common.

In some instances multiple agents have been paid for their parts in the same deal, by one or both clubs and the player, with a ‘wild west’ culture pervasive among some middlemen.

FIFA, however, are bringing in radical new regulations to stop rampant profiteering by greedy intermediaries, although this will lead, it seems, to agents en masse waging war on the global governing body.

Five of the £10m+ deals are examined in case studies in these pages, while others include Emre Can’s move from Liverpool to Juventus in 2018, Hirving Lozano’s move from PSV Eindhoven to Napoli in 2019 and Frenkie de Jong’s transfer from Ajax to Barcelona the same year.

In one case in 2018, the agent of a player moving from a club in France’s Ligue 1 to Germany’s Bundesliga earned a £16m commission on a £20m transfer, while his client’s guaranteed wage for the entirety of his five-year contract was £14m over five years.

As things stand there are no limits to what agents can be paid and no regulation of middlemen. This has been the case since FIFA scrapped agent regulation in 2015, a move that everybody within the world governing body now accepts as, as one insider says, ‘a terrible mistake’.

While FIFA president Gianni Infantino has been criticised for some of his activities since succeeding Sepp Blatter in 2016, his reform agenda around the transfer market, ongoing since 2017, is underpinned by a desire for greater fairness and wealth redistribution.

A raft of reforms has already passed through three stages of FIFA Council approval. The headline changes — which have met with fierce opposition from agents — will involve capping any agents’ fees at 10 per cent of any transfer fee (paid by the selling club), and three per cent of a player’s wages, for contract negotiations.

Agents will be prohibited from working for two clubs in the same deal. All agents will have their names and contact details listed in a publicly-accessible database. Where data protection laws allow, all transactions will be made public, even if specific sums are not published.

From a redistributive point of view, every single international transfer will have to pass through an independent ‘clearing house’, as will all monies involved, and five per cent of all deals will trickle down to the clubs who developed the players involved in the first place.

As Infantino reiterated at a workshop last month, using figures from 2019, the global spend on transfers that year was around £5.5bn, while agents’ fees the same year totalled around £550m, and compensation to ‘training clubs’ was around one 10th of that, at about £55m.

With a five per cent levy taken at the clearing-house stage, FIFA’s intention is that training clubs will earn more than £300m a year, as some of the most excessive agents’ fees are cut.

FIFA know they face a fight with the biggest beasts of the agency world, including Paul Pogba’s agent Mino Raiola, and Cristiano Ronaldo’s ‘super agent’, Jorge Mendes.

As Mel Stein, the president of the Association of Football Agents, writes in these pages, his association of hundreds of middlemen are implacably opposed to caps on agents’ fees.

Stein dismisses the current draft of FIFA’s proposals as ‘completely unacceptable’, adding: ‘The notion of capping agents’ fees at a specific level or percentage is ridiculous, and uncompetitive. If an agent is helping a club to sell or buy a player and all parties are happy to freely bargain on the commission, what is wrong with that?’

Stein also ridicules the suggestioin of an international clearing house for transfers, saying: ‘The FA in England has a clearing house for transfers and it’s not exactly efficient so why do you think a global clearing house will be better? It’s a joke.’

FIFA’s timetable is understood to involve finishing their consultation process with leagues, clubs, unions, and agents early next year, then ratification of the new transfer system by the FIFA Council in the spring. The new system is then expected to come into force before the end of next year.

The sums involved in transfers are eye-watering, with clubs globally spending £36billion on players between 2011 and 2020 and agents pocketing almost £3bn from those deals. That is solely in relation to international (cross-border) transfers.

In the same timespan, payments to training clubs barely moved from around £30m in 2011 to roughly the same in 2020, as agents’ fees grew from around £100m in 2011 to more than £500m in 2020.

In the Premier League in the past five years alone, clubs have made payments to agents totalling £1.181bn. This includes commissions paid for domestic transfers and contract renewals. The panel on the left gives the annual breakdown.

If Mino Raiola’s commissions of almost £42m for his role in the £89.3m transfer of Pogba from Juventus to Manchester United is the most egregious example of agent profiting, it is far from the only one.

Stein is adamant that his association’s members will oppose FIFA’s reforms but FIFA insiders are confident the law will ultimately be on their side. Around 80 per cent of all agents’ fees globally are paid by clubs in six European nations: England, Germany, Italy, Spain, France and Portugal — and FIFA already have tacit approval for their plans from the European Parliament and the Council of Europe.

An EU policy report adopted last month by the European Parliament accepted the need to ‘regulate the activities of agents’ and the importance of ‘the establishment of a clearing house, licensing requirements for agents and caps on agents’ commissions’.

A Council of Europe report earlier this month called on member states ‘to recognise FIFA’s competence to regulate at global level the transfer system, including the adoption of rules seeking to ensure protection of minors, the transparency of financial flows linked to transfers and a sound framework for the access to and exercise of the profession of agent or intermediary.’