AGENT FEE'S TRANSFERS - TABLE

That actually makes very interesting reading!! Fleetwood 👀

Over £5 million going out of the game for no good reason. Agents should be paid by the player if they want one, not the club.

A collective stand by ALL EFL clubs to not pay these is needed.

Outside of L1, notable mentions go to FGR £266k and York £128k in agent fees.

Totally agree. Clubs should be banned from paying any agent fees where the agent is acting for the player - if a player/agent is able to negotiate a signing on fee for the player it should get paid to the player with the appropriate tax deductions - the player can then pay his agent from his net income. They won’t like writing those cheques themselves. 

Since the conference season, I have done a post match 50/50 to raise funds to sponsor a young player each season.

Not sure if it was blarney, but Dave Bright told me they had to scrap the two tier sponsorship costs (younger players tended to be cheaper) due to image rights etc for first year pros instigated by their agent.

Not sure if that is part of the reason the youth team don't get a mention in the programme.

Absolutely agree any agents fees should come from the player not the club.

I work in pensions and in the early 90's bad financial advisors got easy commission to help their own wallets, not to help their clients. You can see the same sort of thing happening in football. How many promising kids make the wrong move based on crap advice from their agent.

Our average home attendance is around 7,900 this season. £214k divided by 7,900 is £27 so (allowing for concessions but ignoring corporates) we find ourselves as a club spending more than one whole home game's pre-tax ticket revenue on agents fees - and what benefit do we get?

Someone needs to sort this out - I assume the UK football regulator will get around to it eventually but this is money being sucked out of the game which is of little or no benefit to the fans...

They have! But I expect £265,999.99 went on Troy Deeney.

UTG!

Sooner or later someone will look properly at it, whether it's football authorities or HMRC. I've read a couple of articles about this recently - in the UK the FA suggest that in nearly 80% of transfers where (for tax purposes) the agent is 'representing both the player and the buying club' that's not the case - in reality the agent is only representing the player in terms of the work that is actually done. But all sides agree to this as all sides benefit tax-wise - however it's basically tax fraud.


In the US many sports require agents working for players to be paid by the player. Services, commissions and agency fees are negotiated in advance and fees/taxes are written into the contract. The negative for this (for clubs and players) is at the highest level of sporting transfers higher rates of tax are paid - although that obviously benefits the government.


A positive outcome was more and more lower-to-mid level sporting transfers/contract negotiations no longer require an agent - just a lawyer (which were involved anyway). There is basically a pro-forma agreement and the player and the club negotiate directly to fill in the blanks, meaning an agent is not required. As far as I can see the only losers in this situation are the agents...

The players pay the agents. So the agents (in theory, if the players agree) get a similar income, but because it comes from the players not the club they also pay more tax on them. So the biggest benefactor is the US Treasury...