The £2,600 favour:
We negotiated a deal for one of our up-and-coming players, around £1,000 a week (£52,000 a year), and it was more about the pathway than the money. So rather than take our 5% commission, I told the manager to add it into the player’s salary. An extra £2,600 would make more difference to him than to us as a business.
The manager agreed, and the player was happy.
But when the paperwork finally came through, whilst the 5% had been included in the player’s salary as agreed, we noticed the manager had inserted another agent into the deal on top of that, taking an extra 5% in agent’s fees, filling the gap we’d deliberately left by waiving our commission.
Think about it: The club was paying extra money than it would have paid if we’d taken our fee from the salary. The player got his 5% rise. And somebody we’d never met got 5% of a deal they had nothing to do with.
Trying to do the right thing for the player had opened up an opportunity for a manager to syphon 5% of a deal into someone else’s pocket.
The £104,000 demand:
Many years later, at a different club, the same manager was involved in a deal for another of our players, this time on £20,000 per week over 4 years. £4.16 million of salary, so a 5% fee of £208,000. The player was on a free transfer. We brought the player to the manager's attention. We discussed all the terms. We showed the representation contract.
And still, the manager inserted the same external agent that had magically appeared on our last interaction many years earlier. Someone we’d never spoken to, who had no relationship with the player, and who was asking for 50% of the fee. Except this time, that number would have been £104,000. The line was:
Either this deal goes through me, or it's not happening.
Sadly, this is not the first time we'd heard these kinds of lines. They are far from an isolated incident. But over the years you get to learn the clubs and managers who behave this way.
In this case, we had multiple other offers for the player, so it was a firm "no" and we put him into another club rather than engaging in this dialogue.
But it still baffles me that in the great sport that we work in, a manager on a huge salary would prioritised a relatively small backhander over getting his first-choice player into the club.
💡 My advice to you, up-and-coming agents: make sure that every message, every conversation, every email, is timestamped and accessible to you in case you need it. Otherwise, money you leave on the table may well end up in someone else’s pocket.
As my very good lawyers put it, "a gentleman’s agreement is only as good as the paper it’s not written on".