INSIDE THE DEALS

It was Freddie Burns' return to Leicester Tigers, as their new kicking and skills coach.

In 19 years as an agent, I'd never done one before. Most agents go a whole career without one, for 2 reasons:

1️⃣ Very few players ever make it to coaching status; and

2️⃣ For most agents, the relationship ends when the easy playing money does. The commission stops, the phone goes cold, and player finds out what his representation was really worth.

I signed Freddie when he was 18 and I was 27, the first client through the door when I set up my own agency, International Sports Consulting

It's a Tuesday in January. A Premier League midfielder gets back from training, makes a coffee and goes through his post at the kitchen counter.

There's one brown envelope with HMRC printed across the top.

It's a demand for £180,000. Due within 30 days!

He opens his banking app and there's no extra income it's taxing. No payment, no invoice, nothing.

So he calls his accountant, who checks and calls back with the worst answer: it's real.

The bill is for money he never received. It's for his agent's commission, paid straight from the club to the agency, in the transfer he signed 18 months ago. HMRC taxed him for it, and nobody had warned him it was coming.

In many cross-border transfers, the two clubs can't really communicate with each other. Other than the universally understood numbers, every clause, every interpretation, every objection travels through whoever sits in the middle.

In many of my biggest deals, that seat belonged to me.

And I got that seat for nothing. My parents moved us to France when I was 4 and Spain when I was 6. I hated those first weeks in a French nursery, understanding nobody, and then again in Spanish school. But....by 7 I was trilingual, and I can attribute 90% of my career success to what happened before that seventh birthday.

When On Running approached Roger Federer about being an ambassador, rather than taking a fee, he put $50 million of his own money into the business at preferential valuation rates.

His 3% stake was worth over $360 million when On listed in 2021, nearly 3 times the $130 million he earned in prize money across 24 years of tennis. By 2025 it was reportedly closing in on $500 million.

The 2026 summer transfer window started with a bang. The British transfer record broken twice in 3 weeks, Manchester City for Elliot Anderson, then Chelsea for Morgan Rogers, and Spurs have paid a club record for Sandro Tonali.

It's too early to judge the value on those 3 at this stage, but the £60 million-plus signings that came before them unfortunately have a pattern.

I once lost a Premier League transfer because of a single screenshot.

I was negotiating on behalf of a French agent with a Premier League club for a top international midfielder.

The backdrop to this was that the player also had a very strong offer from a big Bundesliga club but from out side, everything was verbally agreed: the transfer fee, the wages, the agents's fee, etc.

Here's an example that helps you understand the mindset of Premier League players who are already on several million pounds a year.

Offer one of them a £200,000 pay rise (an extra £4k per week)

Or offer him an unpaid Rolex ambassador deal, with a £50,000 watch gifted to him as part of a 3-year agreement.

Most people reading this are certain they'd take the money. Almost every player takes the commercial deal.

I was closing a Premiership deal for a player when I found a single line, buried deep in the sub-clauses of a side document, that could have terminated his entire contract.

The transfer window is open and release clauses are being tested all over Europe right now. Every deal you'll read about this summer was agreed on its headline terms. A fee, a salary, a start date. Whether it actually completes is decided in the wording underneath, and that wording is where smart agents earn their stripes.

I'll unpack 3 parts of a release clause that few people scrutinise properly, and how each one can change a deal completely.

Manchester City agreed to pay a British record for Elliot Anderson today, a reported £116m, while he was in America starting games for England. Forest had signed him from Newcastle two years ago for around £35m. They have agreed to more than triple their money, and the deal got done before Anderson had even played his final group game.

One of the hardest conversations I have with a young player is telling them to turn down the bigger contract.

A lot of agents only see the next payday. They don't think in terms of a 10 year career, and they don't think about pathway, trajectory and development. They forget that one bad move can close a door that never reopens.

Most people think recruitment is about finding a great player. But that part is by far the easy bit. Every decent scout in the building can hand you a list of who's good. What decides whether a club signs the right players, window after window, is something a lot less glamorous, and it has less to do with football judgement and more about alignment and authority.

It was the day before transfer deadline day ⌛️

We were in a club training ground...and a 6-figure commission was about to go down the drain.

The player had travelled to the local hospitals to get MRI scans and the usual tests, the club photographer has already taken the signing images...but what nobody could see outside the training ground was a frantic 24-hour negotiation playing out in the background.

Early in my career, when I was coming through the agent ranks, I once spent 9 months trying to get a meeting with a particular Premier League manager in London.

Endless rejections, endless follow-ups, but eventually I locked the meeting in through sheer belligerence.

Then, on the day, 45 minutes before we were due to meet, he called to tell me the owner of the club, who was based up north, had summoned him to his office, and so our meeting was off.

Long before a negotiation starts, I'll often sit down with a player and tell them something they find very confusing: Regardless of their appetite to join a particular club, I'm going to open discussions with that club anyway.

I often get pushback here:

Why waste time on a club I'll never sign for?

Why give them the impression I might be available when my mind is already made up?

The reason is that the conversation isn't really about that particular club. It's about establishing the full spectrum of what the player is worth, and you can't do that by only talking to the clubs they like.

I had constructed what I would call a 'slam dunk' deal. Every single box was ticked. It was just a formality at this point.

Then in two seconds flat the whole deal was struck down, and I was on a damage limitation course.

I had been talking to the head of recruitment about a player I represented. They were looking for a target man striker, and we had a great striker that the head of recruitment loved. He actually couldn't believe that the player would even come to the club, and was overjoyed that the transfer fee and the salary requirements fit their budget. He was referring to my player as the missing piece of the jigsaw. In this game, it's rare you get that level of alignment.