There is but one reason why football agents and the money they “earn” are easy targets. It is because they “earn” easily too much money.

Since Monday’s announcement that the 20 EPL clubs shelled out £71 MILLION to agents between October last year and September this, there has been no shortage of people defending the noble cause of the middleman.

 

A popular argument is that most of them are fully-qualified lawyers and that those full qualifications are necessary to negotiate modern football’s complex deals.

Likening them to lawyers is unwise on two counts. 1) lawyers are notoriously “overpaid”, according to public perception – only recently replaced in the public’s ‘affection’ by bankers and their bonuses. 2) some are far from lawyers, as the appearance of former player Barry Silkman among the witnesses for the defence reminds us.

It is a sweeping generalisation to lump all lawyers’ fees in with the high six-or-seven figure sums that certain lawyers have received for certain deals.  There were 803 such deals covered by Monday’s announcement, an average of £88,000-per-deal.

This is still a lot to “ordinary” workers who would, on average, take two-and-a-half years to rake in that sort of money (and there’ll be men on Mars before I make that sort of money writing this sort of stuff).

Nonetheless, £900,000 for his part in a deal in which the selling club wanted to sell, the buying club wanted to buy AND the player wanted the move? It is entirely fair to ask what Zahavi did to deserve remuneration like that, unless it’s mostly expenses – in which case he’s with the wrong mobile phone company.

It puts me in mind of the VERY old joke Irish comedy actor Niall Tobin used to tell about the three builders putting in tenders for some work for the Dublin Corporation.

“Thirty thousand pounds” said a Dublin builder. “Sixty thousand,” offered a Cavan builder. And finally, in walked a Kerry builder, proudly announcing his price as “Ninety thousand pounds.”

The Corporation official, astonished at the figure, asked for a breakdown. “Well,” said the Kerry builder, “thirty thousand for you…thirty thousand for me and we give the job to the Dublin fella!!!”

There’s a lot of ‘Kerry builders’ among modern football agents, it would seem.