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PDC Home Tour to launch on Friday
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One problem with this is I haven't heard of too many PL clubs players offering a 30% pay cut, more offering a deferral - but that simply pushes the problem down the road for a few months if the cash has to be paid.
Meanwhile I expect to hear that a few EFL clubs (League 2, League 1, Championship) are likely to go bust within a couple of months as they cant afford to pay salaries without getting an income.
Can't see any football before say August/September - UK may start to release lock down in say May, but not social distancing. And football is a physical sport, unless new rules are brought in to say no tackling, no getting within 2 or 3 metres of any oppoition player...…..which is why football is months away, it will only come back when social distancing is less necessary..
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Plus you have the coaching staff, officials, camera crew, ambulance workers, and all of the various people that will be at matches even without fans.
‘Fundamentally, football is f***ed’ – what agents are doing and thinking now
The inside line on player-club wage talks, chaotic transfer plans, bargain deals, missing payments and why free agents are back in vogue…
theathletic.com
‘Fundamentally, football is f***ed’ – what agents are doing and thinking now
As usual, their mobile phones haven’t stopped ringing. The only difference for football agents is that it’s not the sort of calls they’re used to taking at this time of year. Sporting directors, chief executives and managers have other things on their mind right now than making signings. “I’ve had two inquiries from clubs asking about a player and that’s it,” one of the country’s leading agents says. “It’s dead quiet.”
Instead, the voice at the other end tends to be a player, asking for advice about pay cuts and deferrals — a subject that has driven some footballers around the bend as they canvass opinion among their squad about the latest proposal. More often than not, the player at the centre of it all ends up going round in circles. “This is carnage, I’ve been on the phone for 12 hours,” one Premier League captain told his agent this week.
“No one can agree,” the agent adds. “You’ve got lads at Manchester City, Man United and Liverpool who all want to do one thing, then you have the lads at Burnley and Norwich. Pay cuts and deferrals will be individual, for sure. It just makes sense.”
While the 20 Premier League captains did come to an agreement this week on the formation of an initiative that will help to provide funds for the NHS in the face of the coronavirus pandemic, accepting pay reductions at clubs is a totally different matter. Some players are hugely sceptical, according to their agents. “A lot of the players at one club were saying, ‘I know what’ll happen, we’ll take a deferral, a cut, then we’ll go and sign some crap player from abroad for £30 million who plays five games for the club and we’ll pay them off three years later.’”
For now, agents are doing a lot more listening than negotiating. Essentially, they are providing support and guidance to their clients at a time of huge uncertainty — the majority of professional footballers aren’t millionaires who are set up for life.
“It’s advice on wage cuts at the moment,” says one agent. “Your players will ask you, ‘What do you think?’
“Say a player is on £10,000 a week, and he pays 50 per cent tax, so he’s on £5,000 net. Then the club want another 30 per cent? Not to say someone couldn’t live off that, but it’s all relative. He’s got a 15-year mortgage because he’s due to retire when he’s 35. He bought his house when he was 20. So it could’ve been £600 a month over 40 years, but instead he’s paying back £5,000 a month. The outgoings are geared up to these boys retiring at 35.”
Most agents are keen to avoid becoming directly involved in negotiations around pay cuts and deferrals. The cynic would say that is because there is no money in it for them, although that is not strictly true. In theory, a pay cut for a player should mean a pay cut for his agent, bearing in mind they normally get a percentage of their client’s salary.
“I’d expect to feel the same pain as the players felt,” one agent says. “Sometimes clubs want a specific figure as an agent’s fee instead of a percentage. If you’ve got a specific figure put in, you won’t be affected. I would say one out of five deals are done like that, and that’s usually the club being smart because they don’t want to incorporate add-ons into the agent’s fee.”
Generally, agents see these pay discussions as an issue for the players to resolve in talks with the Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA) and their club. In that respect, a player’s representative is little more than a sounding board. “We’re trying to stay out of it really,” another agent explains, “because we need to maintain good relationships with the clubs as well as the players. The PFA are fighting for them, that’s what the players want them to do.”
The negotiations are anything but straightforward, not least because financial circumstances will differ greatly within the same dressing room, never mind within leagues. “A unilateral agreement was never going to happen in a million years,” one agent says.
A sports lawyer, who works with Premier League agents and also represents Football League clubs, agrees. “You cannot just impose a blanket pay cut,” he says. “You need to show the players why the money needs to be saved in each individual case. It may be a certain number of weeks for a deferral, that is fair. But a 30 per cent cut just isn’t fair. Can you imagine walking in one day to Morgan Stanley and telling everyone ‘you are docked 30 per cent wages’? It just wouldn’t happen.
“I had a chat with an agent yesterday. He was saying a banker would earn £2 million annually, he would have a longer career, he would have a university degree and a private school background, as well as family wealth. A footballer might have grown up in a council house, can’t believe where he came from and has a soccer school in his local area. That’s what these guys are really saying and thinking.”
There is another intriguing aspect to all of this and it should probably be filed in a boardroom folder marked “reap what you sow”. Some football club owners have generated a lot of goodwill within their club over the years because of their personality, the way they interact with players and staff, and more generally how they run the business.
Others have little or no meaningful contact with the players and have done next to nothing to build up any debt of gratitude over time. Not surprisingly, those relationships will have a significant impact on how players feel about helping their owner or chairman in a time of crisis and whether they believe the situation is as grave as they are being told.
“The thing you have with the Brighton boys is that they like the owner,” an agent says. “Tony Bloom, Brighton’s owner, does everything he can to help the players. They know that if they went to him in any other circumstance with a problem he would help them. But some of these other owners would say, ‘It’s not my problem.’”
It’s not hard to imagine players at Tottenham Hotspur or Newcastle being reluctant to assist chairmen or owners who have a reputation for penny-pinching and were quick to furlough staff at the first opportunity. One agent suggested that Tottenham’s players may struggle to have sympathy for billionaire owner Joe Lewis, particularly those who have been aboard his yacht and seen the lavish decor.
While pay talks are occupying the minds of agents and dominating their conversations with players at the moment, there is a bigger picture for them to consider when it comes to their role within the game. Some are worried about their livelihoods — not every agent is signing off multi-million pound deals like Mino Raiola and Jorge Mendes — and wondering when, realistically, they can expect to be paid the fees they are owed. Others are trying to imagine what sort of state the summer transfer window will be in when it finally opens for business.
Bosmans and bargains — that’s the transfer market theme for the 2020-21 season, according to those who make a living out of moving footballers. It will be a buyers’ market, for sure — and that, naturally, suits the clubs who don’t need a helping hand in the first place.
“For Man United, Chelsea and Man City, buying players will be like businessmen buying businesses that are on the floor. They will see this as a way of maintaining their place at the top of the table for the next five years with no big transfer fees needed,” one agent said.
That comment was made before Ole Gunnar Solskjaer talked about how United “might just be in a situation you can exploit”. For some wider context to that remark, Solskjaer was responding to a question from Gary Neville, who later accepted that he shouldn’t have used the word “exploit” when he asked his former team-mate about United’s transfer strategy in the wake of a global pandemic.
Leaving aside the rights and wrongs of that episode, the reality is that Solskjaer was saying what everybody in the game already knows. United, along with football’s other financial powerhouses, will be able to capitalise on the dreadful state that many football clubs will be in when the summer window opens, and that could have severe consequences for some.
In the Championship, where 11 players were sold for fees in excess of £10 million last summer and the 24 clubs made a collective £140 million profit on transfer deals to partly offset the financial mess elsewhere on their balance sheets, the market is expected to collapse. One agent described it as “a broken division”. Another predicted the big clubs will pick up the best young talent in the second tier for knock-down fees. Expect more fees closer to £5 million than the £25 million Tottenham spent on Fulham’s Ryan Sessegnon last summer.
Some agents — and this, whether you like it or not, is how the business side of football works — are already sensing that doors are opening in a way that wasn’t possible before this pandemic. “I spoke to an agent and the situation has sorted him out big time,” adds the sports lawyer. “The club that has his prized asset now needs money. There will be so much less resistance. You go from public enemy No 1 to being the guy who was sold to save the club.”
Warming to his theme, the lawyer says that he senses a chance for a select group of Premier League clubs to do exactly what Solskjaer spoke about, aided by a growing belief that Financial Fair Play rules will have to be loosened.
“Leicester should be going for it in the summer,” the lawyer adds. “Or Everton. Go for it big time. FFP will be a bit relaxed. You can go big without spending too much money. You can get two £60 million players for £30 million this summer. Leicester or Everton could not normally do that. Now they could. They can say to clubs in Italy or Spain, take it or leave it, because the money isn’t coming from anywhere else. Lyon, Lille, Marseille, Ajax… players will be there for the taking. You could have a real go.”
Not every club will have that financial wherewithal, which is why another agent thinks that free transfers will be in vogue again. Willian at Chelsea, Jan Vertonghen at Spurs, Liverpool’s Adam Lallana and Ryan Fraser at Bournemouth are among those who stand to benefit as their contracts wind down. At the very least, the pool of clubs interested in signing them will have grown.
“There was so much money out there before that clubs would pay for the player they really wanted. They wouldn’t take a Bosman because he’s a Bosman — he had to be good enough,” an agent explains. “But this summer it might switch around. Now, because of this crash, we don’t know where the transfer market is, so Bosmans might be more valuable than at any time since Steve McManaman’s days. Bosmans could have their heyday again.”
Another agent echoes those sentiments. “I am already getting calls from clubs asking, ‘Is he going to be a free? We’ll have him.’ Before the coronavirus they weren’t even looking at that player, they were looking at spending £3-4 million abroad. They can’t be thinking along those lines anymore. Now the coronavirus has struck, those free transfers are going to become premium players, they will be snapped up at the earliest point.”
Forget the violins. Few will have any sympathy for football agents when they think about the fallout from the coronavirus and the jobs that could be lost in this profession. The 92 professional clubs spent about £318 million on agents last season (£260 million of that expenditure was in the Premier League, including £43 million from Liverpool alone), which is a staggering sum. It is little wonder that supporters — and some club executives for that matter — believe that far too much money is going out of the game and into the pockets of agents.
The reality, though, is that footballers need representation and, as with any industry, there are good and bad people making a living out of being agents (or “intermediaries”, as FIFA decided they should be known after the world governing body controversially abandoned its licensing system in 2015).
Agents normally get paid their percentage of the player’s salary, or a fixed fee if that is what was agreed, in two installments: in February and September. All payments made by a club to an intermediary have to go via the FA’s “clearing house” first, along with the paperwork. The process at the FA can be slow, but nothing compared to how long some clubs take to transfer the money in the first place — and that was the case when football was operating as normal.
While the big agencies in the UK (such as Stellar, Wasserman, Base Soccer, New Era and Unique Sports Management) will be able to ride out this storm, some of the smaller companies — and especially those intermediaries working in League One and League Two — may well struggle to survive.
“God knows how some of the agents operating at, say, Doncaster will get paid,” says an agent working for one of the five mentioned above. “Clubs at that level will eventually turn £3,000 in February into £500 a month from October, when the season is up and away and they’ve got fans in the ground. And then they’ll be so far behind in terms of September’s payments.”
It is not uncommon at Championship level for agents to pursue payments for six months or more and to send letters threatening to sue before seeing their money. Nobody wants to go down that route, but it is often a case of needs must. One agency spent two years chasing a five-figure sum from a League One club, eventually agreed an installment plan, received the first payment and then the money dried up again.
“You have to send letters a lot,” says an experienced agent. “We aren’t getting paid at the minute. We’ve got it in our heads that we might not get paid for six months. But I know I’ll get paid by certain clubs. In theory, agents could say to all clubs, ‘We want our money, pay it or we’re going to sue you.’ But do you want to sue a football club at this moment in time? We won’t do that. But some agents will if they need to survive.”
It is understood that one Championship club has already said that it will defer all agent payments for a year. The way things are going, that could be one of the better agreements in the Football League. Another agency told The Athletic that, in the wake of the pandemic, they are basing their financial forecasts on not receiving a penny of the money they are owed from League One down. It is almost unthinkable in this financial climate to chase an invoice at that level.
Then again, Premier League clubs present their share of challenges too. “Agents are always the last people to be paid — every time,” says the sports lawyer. “I had a chat last week with an agent of a Premier League player. He was due money in a few months’ time — you are normally paid in February or September, but some installments can be paid in June. I said to him I wouldn’t be surprised if you get asked by this actually quite healthy club to defer it. He said he would defer, within reason.
“But there is so much paperwork that goes into these agency agreements. You need to tweak the FA paperwork, there are forms to be doing. Will agents want interest? Will agents want legal fees paid by clubs for the amending of agreements? They would be absolutely entitled to expect that.”
Except what people are entitled to, and what people can expect to get, are two different things in the world right now. Plus, there is a balance to be struck in all of this — nobody wants to burn bridges. “Realistically, agents are in a weird position,” the sports lawyer adds. “If I have a player in a first team at a club, I am not going to present a winding-up petition to that club. It would affect your client and future relationship.
“I expect agents to have a lot of offers made for payments deferred. Clubs will use that to their advantage. There are cases when agents are due money owed nine months ago. Now you hear from clubs, ‘We were going to pay, but coronavirus…’ I am sorry, but that is bollocks.
“One of those particular clubs has a wealthy owner who doesn’t put his hand in his pocket. We are talking five and six-figure payments here. These agents are not millionaires in most cases, they do their accounts and their VAT and are good guys. You cannot just write off money like this. Junior agents will be on £20,000 per year plus commission. It is going to be really difficult for agents, balancing between upsetting clubs they are dealing with and protecting their own agency.”
In truth, there are so many unknowns in all of this, right down to how long the summer window will be open for business. One leading agent envisages everything being crammed into a few weeks, which is how clubs often end up doing their deals anyway. Another says the total opposite. “It won’t be condensed. It will be 12 weeks. The law (as laid down by FIFA) is 16 weeks, of which January is one month. So they’ll then do three months from a sensible date.”
Then there is the question as to what exactly happens with the players who are out of contract on June 30, especially as we now know that the season will almost certainly be extended in the Football League as well as the Premier League. Agents are being quizzed every day by players who are in that position of being on a free transfer in the summer, and unable to come up with a clear answer, with FIFA’s vague guidance earlier in the week doing nothing to help matters.
Realistically, none of those soon-to-be out-of-contract players — and there are hundreds of them in the Championship alone — will want to take a pay cut or defer wages unless it is imposed on them. Some of those players actually stand to benefit by the season being extended, given they are on salaries that they will not be able to command elsewhere. But will they even want to play on if they are jeopardising a long-term deal for a short-term contract extension?
As for loan players, that is another huge issue. One Premier League player is costing the Championship club where he is on loan £20,000 a week, which is a lot of money at the best of times. It is financial suicide when that club has no realistic prospect of winning promotion.
“Loans are a problem,” an agent says. “It doesn’t affect them (the players) because they’re getting paid by their parent club (which is what happens with all domestic loans). But say a Championship club is mid-table, the season is extended for six weeks, they’re going to have to keep paying the parent club until the season is over even if they don’t want those loan players. And it’s not like they’re playing for prize money, like in the Premier League. It will kill some of the Championship clubs.”
Desperate times call for desperate measures. Agents anticipate Championship clubs being open to renegotiating transfer clauses that would ordinarily have been triggered further down the line — for example, payments that are due depending on Premier League survival or a player reaching a certain number of appearances. That could mean clubs writing off six-figure sums to get their hands on cash now.
The landscape is constantly shifting in the top flight, too. One Premier League club held a video call with an agent recently with a view to signing a player who was in line to join another top-flight team for the 2020-21 season. The selling club are desperate for money, but the original buyer is stretched to the limit financially, so they are at the risk of being outbid. The player’s new buyers are confident they can land him for as little as £500,000 more than the fee that was previously agreed. That a Premier League club could lose out on a signing over that small a sum says everything.
One agent is working round the clock with two clubs to extend an option-to-buy in a loan deal. The option is to buy for £15 million, but it expires on May 5. The player wants to make the move permanent but the loan club will not be in a position to make a decision or pay the money by that date because of the uncertainty. The parent club will probably seek a higher fee if the clause expires, but equally in the current climate they might not get a higher fee. So the agent hopes brokering an extension will suit all parties, but it’s a race against time.
There are brutal mind games at play, too. One agent talks about a young Premier League defender who is destined for a multi-million pound transfer this summer and says that the player’s chances of leaving could be helped if he refuses to give up a chunk of his wages. The agent’s theory is that the player’s employers will be in a more desperate state as a result and therefore likely to accept a lower offer for him when the window opens.
Another agent — and this illustrates just how confused the thinking is in football right now — takes the opposite view and believes that his client has a far better chance of getting a big move to another Premier League club if he “doesn’t piss the owners off now” and instead accepts a pay deferral. “It could get to the summer and they say, ‘We’re gonna ask for £30 million for you.’ He can turn around and say, ‘Well, hold on a minute, I helped you out a few months ago. Now you’re holding me to ransom?’
Football, like so many other businesses, is in uncharted waters and there is an awful lot of second-guessing going on. It is impossible to say with any certainty what will happen over the coming months because there is no precedent for this sort of crisis. Indeed, that raises an interesting question in itself: will future contracts protect against loss of earnings in the event of a pandemic?
“A couple of my clients abroad have income protection insurance, so they should be OK theoretically,” the sports lawyer says. “Standard contracts in England don’t have force majeure clauses if a season is suspended. But in Scotland, they do.
“At Hearts, all the players got a letter saying there will be a 50 per cent reduction. The agent called and asked if it was allowed. It turns out it is. The Scottish contract has a cover page and then three schedules attached to it. These are standard PDF documents for the standard SPL contract. But it is there, in black and white, schedule 3, paragraph 12, ‘In the event of the Scottish FA deciding that the game shall be suspended, either entirely or in any district or districts as provided for in the articles of association of the Scottish FA, this agreement shall be correspondingly suspended, unless the club is exempted from such suspension or the club otherwise determines.’
“That’s all it says. There is no explanation. Nobody has foreseen it happening. That’s why a club like Hearts can turn around and say: ‘Take a 50 per cent pay cut or we suspend your contract.’ The players have signed this. Hearts and other clubs are relying on it.”
It is understood that Hearts are not yet enforcing the clause and still hope to agree a deal with the players before there is a need to resort to it.
Elsewhere, the conversations carry on, between the leagues and the union, between the union and the players, between the players and the clubs, and between the players and their agents, to try and somehow find a resolution. Maybe it is easier to look for a conclusion. As one agent put it rather succinctly, “Fundamentally, football is fucked.”
I cant remember if I posted this in here. In the USA they seem to be going through the same suggestions for restarting sports as we are (probably where we got the ideas from!).
I've a feeling that nothing will happen here until what happens with the NFL. Don't ask me why, I just think the PL sometimes steal their ideas from there.
Anyway here's the article. Its worth ten minutes of your day.
Bursting the Bubble: Why Sports Aren't Coming Back Soon
The NBA, NFL and MLB are dreaming up ways to play amid a pandemic—it all sounds great, until you talk to people who actually know science.www.si.com
Fuck.
The old boy walking round his garden has raised about £12 million apparently. Making the song and dance the footballers made about giving a week’s wages or whatever it was, even more pathetic. I’d like to know how much they raised after giving it so much publicity.
Our defence and midfield will be ok then.
The big two are all that matter in that league. They are looked after in this scenario. Getafe wouldn’t be happy though. But hey who cares about Getafe anyway??
Premier League would get some heavy duty legal opposition if they tried this I reckon.
Well if the PL do that at least I’d save £20 per month on BT Sport. I’m not paying to watch anyone else in Europe and it’s not worth it for the few occasions our away PL matches are on live. Every cloud...
Sounds like it. And just about everything else too for 12-18 months.
I would like to see Ndomebele in 12-18 months
I've got (mostly standing) gigs that have been postponed until Feb, Mar, Apr & May next year but some until Aug & Sept this year.
Really??? Armpit to armpit with no air amongst 1,000s? Went to see Supergrass at Ally Pally on 6th March just before things got really mental and that was disconcerting enough.
At least at Tottenham you're in the open air once you're out of the concourse, although I was in front of two blokes a few weeks back one or both which couldn't help but spit on me (accidentally) every now and then whilst having to listening to their fascinating commentary (and there is a another section in the South Stand I avoid like the proverbial having been subjected to someone's weapons grade breath more than once).
The real problem is the Public transport to get there. Cattle trucks and will take hours if they attempt social distancing.