I was negotiating a boot and apparel deal with one of the biggest sportswear brands in the world for one of my players. He was at a Premier League club, knocking on the England door, and we had agreed a sizeable retainer: £400,000 per season on a 4 year deal.
We’d been going backwards and forwards on the final number for months. Finally landed on a number both sides were comfortable with. The deal was agreed.
Then the contract arrived.
Now I know that I keep banging on about how deals are built in the clauses as opposed to the headlines, and this is the perfect example, because very deep in the contract was a clause stipulating a 50% retainer reduction if the player’s club didn’t qualify for the Champions League that season.
Perhaps acceptable if you play at Real Madrid or Manchester City. But my player's club had never qualified for the Champions League. Not once in its entire history, and they certainly weren’t about to that season.
Think about the ramifications of that for a second.
This wasn’t a performance clause. It was a guaranteed 50% reduction.
The £400,000 we’d spent months agreeing was instantly £200,000, and it would stay that way for most of the 4 seasons of the deal. £800,000 gone, sitting in a clause nobody had mentioned during the negotiations.
My first reaction was to be slightly irked (I found it such an obvious waste of everyone’s time). But my experience taught me to investigate the whole situation before having a strong opinion on it. Staying pragmatic in negotiations is where the money gets made.
So I went back to the brand and explained it plainly: this clause halves the deal instantly, which means we don’t have a deal.
Their reply was that the clause was in all of their athlete contracts.
I said that’s fine for players at certain clubs, but if we're going to add that clause into this contract, then the retainer needs to be doubled or there is no deal. It was binary.
Those weren’t negotiating, it was just basic maths. If a 50% reduction is certain, the only number that gets my player to the figure we had spent months agreeing is double.
They escalated it internally, had their own legal discussions, and eventually took the clause out. Having done all that work to get this far, they could see that, despite their company policy, the circumstances of this deal meant that it simply wasn’t applicable.
To be fair to them, I don’t think they were trying to undermine the player. They just weren’t used to giving a deal of this size to a player at a non-Champions League club, so their standard paperwork had never been tested against one.
But notice that even after I pushed back, their first response wasn't to be understanding, it was “it’s in all our contracts”. The brand equivalent of "computer says no" and I had to be pretty firm before anything moved.
It was further negotiation dressed as admin.
And that’s the part of this job nobody teaches. The headline number takes months, gets announced and gets remembered. But the clauses beneath it are what make or break the deal.
💡 Lesson: A contract is often a second negotiation. Don’t take “that’s how we’ve always done it” as an immovable position.