The phone call no agent wants to receive.

My player called me to tell me he'd ruptured his ACL just as we were coming into renegotiation time.

Internally, my heart sank for him a little bit because I knew the implications of what this would mean for the next contract, but externally I went into reassurance mode for him.

From a negotiation perspective, it can impose one of your biggest handicaps, and what makes it so brutal is the timing.

The negotiation season:

The last year of a contract, or the year a player was most likely to get transferred, is the year they're being watched and judged continuously. So when 9 months of that year disappears, you're losing the strongest weapon in your arsenal.

And clubs have a shorter memory than you'd think. Unless you're an absolute rock star playing for your country every match, you're out of the shop window quicker than you would imagine. Most seasoned 1st-team players don't realise how fragile their visibility actually is until something like this takes it away from them.

Layer cognitive bias on top of that, which, by the way, is just human nature and happens in every club, whether they recognise it or not.

If you're a rugby prop and you've done your neck or your back, every recruitment director looking at you is wondering if its going to happen again

If you're a winger and you've done your hamstring, they're wondering if you've still got the pace, and pace was the whole reason they were interested in you in the first place.

If your age starts with a 3 and the injury is one of the big ones, the door starts closing on its own. People often don't say any of this out loud but it happens.

What smart clubs do when the cards flip:

The other thing that happens with the smartest club-side negotiators is the renewal offer lands on your desk at a time when the player's worth (and self-esteem) is at its lowest. It makes total sense, and from a business perspective, as cold as it sounds, that's exactly what I would do. The leverage is gone, the starting position has moved completely, and they know they have a better chance at getting a more favourable deal for them now than they could only a few weeks ago.

Or a worse version of that is that the negotiations that were ongoing at that point suddenly dry up, and even the incumbent club want to wait to see how the injury recovers. What's challenging about that is that often, by the time the injury does (if it does) during the season, a lot of the best deals are already gone, and you're negotiating with clubs who have spent most of their budget for the following season (again, a position of weakness).

So even if you're putting negotiations on hold from the player's side until they're back on the pitch and fit, showing their value again (which is the right strategy most of the time in these circumstances) if the injury is long enough, there is still an inevitable downside.

All that being said, this is why the conversations that protect the player's mental health at that point are vital. You want to paint the honest picture, and you need to explain that from a negotiation perspective, you have to play the hand you're dealt, and that hand has now changed for the worse, but you alter the strategies within which to optimise that situation.

It's important to know that, if you're an experienced agent or negotiator, it doesn't always end in a lower salary than would have been on the table before that big injury. The right conversations at the right time can still land an improved offer.

The bigger picture:

If you didn't think about it before, this should make you think ahead to the time when a player's career does finish. That time will come, and it can be accelerated by injury, but it will come.

And this is particularly true in rugby, I don't think there's ever been a player in the history of the sport so far who's earned enough during their playing career to never have to work again.

Football is different on the surface because the money is significantly higher, but anybody who knows footballers, or works with footballers, recognises that their baseline lifestyles are also much more expensive. Reports have claimed that 40% of professionals will face bankruptcy within five years of retirement.

That stat alone should change the conversation between an agent and a young player.

So as an adviser, as a minimum, once their salary reaches a certain level, you should be recommending career ending injury insurance (because that will give them a couple of years of guaranteed income whilst they transition properly to the next part of their career rather than scrambling anxiously for the next pay-check).

And that's just the safety net. Equally as important is starting earlier on their financial planning: pensions, ISAs, investments, proper wealth management. Far too few players have any of this in place.

💡 Remember: the deal you're negotiating today is one part of a much bigger picture.

The important element is making sure your player is ready for the day the deals stop, because for many people it comes years earlier than anyone expected, on a training pitch, on a wet Tuesday afternoon when nobody saw it coming....