Well done, Burnely Football Club. No, not for having the dubious honour of the Master of Spin, Alastair Campbell, as a fan, but for spending a mere £468,398 on football agents in the preceding year to 30 November. Recent regulations compel the publication of such previously mysterious football club figures each year, and a glance at the BBC’s website makes for intriguing reading. Manchester City (who else?) are the biggest featherers of agency nests, shelling out just under £13m, while the remainder if the Big Agency Four is comprised of Chelsea (£9,562,223), Liverpool (£6,657,305) and Tottenham (£6,066,935). Perhaps surprisingly, and certainly commendably, Manchester United hover a few places above the relegation zone with spending of £1,517,393. Portsmouth, this year’s cast-iron candidates for a trip to the Championship, spent £3,184,725, money which does not appear to have done them much good.
What are we to make of all this? Well, Swordplay recalls that sometime ago the Times ran an article lamenting the rise of football agents and proposing that in their stead lawyers might care to step up to the plate. Well known former Leeds United and Bradford City player John Hendrie was chief among those who called for more lawyerly involvement in football player transfers, memorably saying that “Agents are like Praying Mantis around players. They are accepted as part and parcel of the game but the majority put their own interests first.”
Hendrie went on to tell the Times that “Agents can have a destabilising influence — after all, it’s in their interests to unsettle a player — and often they will tie young players in to one-sided contracts that aren’t properly explained. Sports law has developed so much now that the main criticism of solicitors acting on behalf of players — that they lack knowledge of the sporting side of the business — is no longer applicable. In many cases a solicitor can more effectively represent a player, at a fraction of the cost of an agent and without any incentive to unsettle players.”
Hendrie said all this back in 2005. Since then, tales of skullduggery amid agents and unscrupulous football managers continue to abound; indeed, threats of libel action as much as discreet (and not so discreet) promises that “you’ll never work in this industry again” are often gossiped about by those who take an interest in such things in football club stands. Hendrie, though, back then already closely associated with a law firm undertaking pioneering work in looking after footballers, has moved on, and in a direction that appears to herald an even more professional way of dealing with the purchase and sale of a football player. He is now working with Field, an innovative collective of lawyers, property experts, tax supremos and designers.
The Field team comprises Blacks solicitors, Savills, HSP Tax Ltd and Turn & Key design agency. It’s a formidable alliance, one which seeks to put the professionalism into sportsperson management for good (memo to brown envelopes: your fate is the shredder). Utilising the cross-fertilisation of know-how that comes from those who’ve been at the top of their sports and their professions, Field aims to provide a one-stop shop for sportspeople with none of the “it’ll cost you £100,000 just to meet my client in the car park” that has bedevilled fooball agency.
We wish the venture luck. Anything that will see an end to what Hendrie once described as the “substantial commissions, cosy deals and conflicts of interest” inherent in the activities of football agents has got to be a good thing.
Pictured courtesy of TanYauHoong: a shredder, otherwise known as ‘the place where football agents and their brown envelopes belong’.
[...] in Field, an innovative collective of lawyers, property experts, tax supremos and designers, as last year came to a close. Among other things, Field aims to bring what many observers would say is a much-needed [...]
For a certain poet, an unspoiled stretch of seaside was like “the holy hush there is in the land on Christmas morning. The roads fairly empty, the sky almost free of aeroplanes and you begin to hear and see and smell once more”.
But who uttered these lines?
(It’s a Monday, and this is your starter for 10 – and yes, we’re fresh to the metropolis, from a coastal sojourn.)
The following words appeared in a Times article in 2003, about the paper’s recently departed Head of Legal, Alastair Brett. They’ve been doing the rounds in the wake of Brett’s sudden exit last week, though without attribution. Who, we wonder, wrote them? Two suspects present themselves – our own occasional scribe, Alex Wade, and Dominic Carman, son of the late, great George (an old mucker of Brett’s). Or was someone else the author? Whatever: the fact remains that Brett was a fearless, tenacious and excellent newspaper lawyer, a man whose commitment to press freedom coursed through every vein in his body. We don’t know the precise reasons for his departure, but he will be missed.
“[He] is known for his impassioned commitment to press freedom – so impassioned that he has been described as “certifiably insane”. Capable of an intimidatory snarl or two, and prepared to be stubborn, Brett is far from mad. He is erudite, charming (so the ladies say), and not known for sitting on the fence. If his sanity has, tongue firmly in cheek, been questioned, one thing not open to doubt is that Brett epitomises the old school Fleet Street lawyer”.
Pictured: Fleet Street - not the same as it used to be.
A curious observation leaps at us from Roy Greenslade’s piece about whether Conrad Black, shortly to roam the high-class hotels of the world again as a free man, will return to the UK and carry out his threat to sue his biographer, Tom Bower, for libel:
I somehow doubt that he would have the appetite, or the funds, to pursue a libel action, but Black marches to the sound of his own drummer, so he might just do that. Even if he did, my money would still be on Bower winning.
Hang on, Roy – what about suing via a no win, no fee deal? Funds or no funds, a CFA would see Conrad through – though maybe he’ll remember what happened to the last press baron who sued Bower. Anyone for Richard Desmond’s curious dalliance with libel?
Pictured: the kind of place in which Conrad Black may be spotted (if not at the Royal Courts of Justice).
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A good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers.
Πλάτων, Greek philosopher.