FIGURES released this week showed that more than £400million was spent by Premier League clubs on agent fees — a staggering amount and nothing short of a scandal.
Between February last year and this February, the total was £409.1m - money which is being trousered by agents, often for setting up deals which had already been agreed.
Across the top five leagues in England, the actual total was even higher — £483.6m — with Championship sides accounting for a whopping £63m.
And even the women’s game is not immune as over £2m went to agents working for WSL players.
A worldwide total for how much agents have earned in recent years would run into the billions of pounds.
Football supporters will be asking themselves, ‘Why?’.
What benefit do agents bring to the game and why is this colossal amount of money not going to where it should be?
The huge sums paid to intermediaries and facilitators means it is not going to the game’s grass roots, or improving stadiums, or developing the women’s game, or encouraging fans from all sections of society to come to matches, or... the list could go on.
Above all, though, the role of agents is to actively encourage players to move clubs.
They get paid, substantially when players switch, so it is a massive incentive towards instability and every club in the land, from Arsenal to Accrington Stanley, suffers.
Agents are rewarded when their players show disloyalty to a club.
Therefore, it is no surprise that those same players move with alarming frequency.
What irks me even more is that some agents, although not all, use threats to get what they want.
The conversation goes something like this, ‘Pay me this or the player won’t come’.
I am suspicious of this because I’m convinced, more often than not, that players aren’t aware of how their agent is behaving.
Effectively, they can hold clubs to ransom, which is wholly unfair.
The overall effect is agents get paid, in vast sums, while clubs, and sometimes even players, pay the price, literally.
While agent fees go up, transfers go up and that also creates a bubble that football lives in, but surely cannot sustain any longer.
So, what is the answer? I don’t know anyone who thinks this is good for the game.
The proposed new Independent Football Regulator could fix agents’ fees.
I know it has been tried before by Fifa, who lost that battle in court, but the IFR could slap a levy on all fees so that they could be used constructively and reinvested into the game.
In the meantime, the money being drained away into the pockets of agents, many of whom are already wealthy beyond their wildest dreams, continues its unchanging way.
Perhaps one of the most concerning aspects of this monetary merry-go-round for agents is the fact that wealthier clubs can afford the more excessive fees.
And this trend for astronomical agent fees has got worse in recent years because in season 2021-22 that figure stood at ‘only’ £272m for the top flight.
A year later it was £318m and now, two seasons in a row, it has topped £400m.
I know what supporters will make of this.
It is a racket and money which should be going towards lowering ticket prices, improving stadiums and developing the game at all levels is simply being rinsed away.
This agent-driven transfer system is bad for football and it rewards sharp business practices, not sporting endeavour.
If we can find possible signs of life on a planet 729 trillion miles away, surely we can fix this, an arrangement which serves only one master — agents.