Agents

When will football as a whole sort the issue of agents! Agents work for the players so why should clubs pay their fees? In any other business, an agent is paid for directly by the person using their services not the person buying the product.

In business terms, that would make being an agent more competitive as they would have to compete with each other to gain business. If payments from clubs to agents were banned, there would also be more transparency. The current scheme is a scam and governing bodies such as FIFA, UEFA and FA should man up and sort it out.

Agents are leaches on football and its yours and mine hard-earned money which is paying for their fees, for which they do, not a lot. They are the Bankers and Policticians of the football world.

They won't and to a degree they can't. Agents are a symptom of the death spiral football is in, and it's going to take some fundamental changes to fix it.

Poppett63 said:

When will football as a whole sort the issue of agents! Agents work for the players so why should clubs pay their fees? In any other business, an agent is paid for directly by the person using their services not the person buying the product.

In business terms, that would make being an agent more competitive as they would have to compete with each other to gain business. If payments from clubs to agents were banned, there would also be more transparency. The current scheme is a scam and governing bodies such as FIFA, UEFA and FA should man up and sort it out.

Agents are leaches on football and its yours and mine hard-earned money which is paying for their fees, for which they do, not a lot. They are the Bankers and Policticians of the football world.

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You can blame HMRC

Unlike actors, writers, rugby players, tennis players etc, footballers cannot claim tax relief on payments to agents - in other words if footballers paid their agents then it would have to come out of their post tax pay rather than pre-tax.

As it is HMRC still treat a lot of the fees paid to agents as a 'benefit in kind' and tax the player based on the fee paid by the club.

As for what they do then I think it is a little simplistic to say they don't do a lot - without agents then transfers, as well as initial employment terms, would be very one sided with all the initiative with the clubs rather than shared with players.