‘Young player worth £20m will go abroad for £400k and come back for £10m’ – Top agent spills the beans
This feature appears in the current edition of talkSPORT's sister publication, Sport magazine, the brilliant free weekly packed full of fantastic stuff. They're on Facebook, or you can follow them on Twitter @SportMagUK and download the FREE iPad app here.
Before Jorge Mendes or Mino Raiola, there was Jon Smith. His agency, First Artist, represented more than 400 clients - including Diego Maradona and the England team. Smith was football’s first super-agent.
His book, The Deal, is part-memoir, partexposé on how football agents make - and justify - their money, the machinations of transfer deadline day, and negotiating with the game’s most influential people.
“Today, football - other than sex - is probably the biggest entertainment on the planet,” Smith tells Sport. “We did that. By educating people that sport isn’t just sport - it’s entertainment. And that’s when it becomes a business too. And that’s when my god-given talent of being able to put you in a room and make it work with someone else financially kicked in.”
Here, straight from the agent’s mouth, is how it all works.
Paul Pogba’s agent reportedly earned £20m from the player’s record £89m move to Manchester United. How can the agent justify taking a seemingly ridiculous cut of that transaction?
“People ask me about Pogba’s transfer and his agent’s cut, but I know what Mino Raiola had to do to earn that: 10 years of living, breathing and sleeping with Pogba. Look at that deal: £89m. Manchester United have [reportedly] sold £190m worth of shirts since then. So was it a bad deal? I don’t think so.
“It depends what you call a ridiculous amount of money. I grew up at a time when everything was sizeably cheaper in every walk of life. I think it’s ridiculous - and this is stupidity [for the sake of an example] - that I should have to pay 30p to use the loo at Victoria station. But when I grew up it was a penny - spend a penny. Life has changed. A bank that’s lost half a billion paying its traders millions of pounds in bonuses because they didn’t lose more is also ridiculous. The price of your house in London is ridiculous. Most people can’t get on the property ladder anywhere near London, unless they have the backing of the Bank of Mum and Dad. Life is like that. Yes, the money is big.”
Before you sold First Artist in 2011, The Evening Standard ran the headline: “Bad day for football as good agent sells”. Why were you the good guy in an industry seemingly full of bad guys?
“I learned my trade when I was living in the United States. And I was always taught by the big agents over there: do it with a smile. We are professionals. Be tough. Be firm. Have an iron fist, but put the velvet glove round it. I came back [to the UK] when I had the England team. In those days, all the agents were selling stories to journalists. That was how they made their money. ‘You want to interview my boy? You have to pay £1,000.’ I stopped all that. I said: ‘We’re going to give you everything. You can have it for free.’ I was very important, because I had Maradona and the England team [including John Barnes, pictured with Smith, below]. But I could also say: ‘We will produce the photograph for you, and it will be branded.’
"So I was being paid a lot of money by Mars, or Coke or Trebor or whoever - we were the guys bringing sponsors into football. But we were doing it with a smile.”
You have talked about a transfer for a young, English Premier League player you won’t name who will go abroad for a small fee, probably in January, when he is in the final six months of his contract. The selling club previously wanted £20m. Prospective buyers were £2m or so short with their bid. You have said it is part of a “business strategy”. Can you explain the strategy?
“He’ll go [abroad] for £400,000 compensation because he can. If it went to tribunal here [in the UK], it would be £20m-plus. Then he’ll play there for as short a time as the regulations allow and he’ll come back here for £10m. Maybe £15m. And the club he’s parked at will do very nicely. They’ll pay the agents a nice fee. And the player will make a lot more money, and he’ll pay them a fee. And thank you very much.
“Those agents are going to earn about £5m. Everyone’s going to go: ‘Jesus, £5m for doing that?’ But they have saved millions, they have made millions and their commission is millions. It’s just a figure. If they’d saved tens of thousands, they’d make tens of thousands. But they haven’t. They’re dealing in millions of pounds. Everything has grown into a new dimension.”
What did you make of the summer transfer window?
“Everybody overpaid for most things. Actually, not everyone. Look at West Ham: 13 transactions, all between £3m and £8m at the most. Even Simone Zaza, they got on a loan.
“However [in the wider scheme of things], the £5m player became £10m. The £12m player became nearly £25m, the £30m player became nearly £50m. Until the last week of the window. At that point, the English clubs stood together and just said: ‘We’re not paying that.’ And the prices came down by about 20 per cent. Transfer deadline day was a Wednesday. From the previous Thursday, prices were falling. Because, don’t forget, we were penalised by a weak pound. So that was interesting. The market is a microcosm of the world we live in. It’s a rapacious market because it is in-your-face for a very short period of time.”
And that is why we see so much business at the last minute - it’s basically a waiting game.
“Yes. Even with the income levels, these prices are eye-watering. Average players going for £12m. And it doesn’t stop there. Because the agent will say, quite rightly: ‘Hey, my guy’s £12m. He’s not on £40,000 a week any more. I want £80,000.’”
That must be quite an easy conversation to have? Because a player’s wage can be seen as a derivative of the fee he has gone for.
“If you deal with the biggest clubs, they have got a system in place. Every deal is not at the whim of the chairman or emotional baggage. I say in the book, if you are a successful global football agent, as I was, you have 50 customers, really.
There’s only so many Tescos and Marks & Spencers. And I always believed in ingratiating myself with them - always being as tough as I could for my player, because nobody respects you if you roll over - and being able to cohabit with these guys.”
Is that the kind of position Jorge Mendes has worked himself into?
“That’s exactly what Jorge Mendes [whose clients include Jose Mourinho and Cristiano Ronaldo, pictured] has done. He’s circled a few clubs and made them his mainstay. Places like CSKA Moscow and various other clubs, where he has huge influence now. Where the management sort of rely on him. And even in England - at Wolves, the Chinese consortium are completely mesmerised by Jorge [Fosun International, the China-based investment group that took control of the club in the summer, have said Mendes will be key to bringing in players from Benfica, another club with which he has close ties]. He’s in a position where he can say to the club: ‘I want this player in, I want to move things around…’ Jorge has taken it to a whole new level.”
You have spoken elsewhere about Andrei Arshavin’s last-minute transfer to Arsenal that happened when you thought - almost right up to the deadline - that it might fall through. Does a transfer that didn’t come off for you stand out in your memory?
“One of the transfers [that didn't happen] that I got upset about was on deadline day. You try to circle all the bases. You try to make sure you are on the right side of the seller - the selling club is dictating terms. You try to make sure you are close to the purchasing club, so you can make the right deal. And obviously the player and the player's family have to be in your orbit.
“On the very last day one day, we had a very nice lad called Sebastien Bassong at Tottenham, and his transfer [out of White Hart Lane] had broken down, for whatever reason. [Then QPR manager] Harry Redknapp was our friend, and QPR were telling us: 'Let's get Bassong.' We'd taken Bassong into Tottenham, and it was okay, it was working, but not that well. It was to everybody's delight, in a way, that QPR had come in for him at the very last minute. So Bassong says goodbye to all the lads at the training ground. Gets in his car, goes to Loftus Road. [But] we hadn't done our job right. We hadn't circled Harry. We couldn't find him. He was on the phone doing whatever he was doing on deadline day - shouting and screaming at people in his normal way. We'd been dealing with the hierarchy at QPR, who were trying to put things in place in the final few hours [of the window]. They'd lost one [centre-back], they had to get another.
“Daniel [Levy] was happy to sell. We then got a phone call from Harry. [We tell him:] 'We've got Bassong coming over to you.' He said: 'Why? No, I don't want him, I want Anton Ferdinand.’ [We said:] 'Yeah, but the Anton Ferdinand deal has broken down.' [Redknapp responded:] 'Yeah, but we're only a little bit apart, I'm sure we can sort it out… Give me five minutes.'
“So, we get a phone call back about 15 minutes later: 'We've called Anton back, we think we can do it.' We've now got to tell our lad, who is sitting with a representative of ours at Loftus Road: 'So sorry.' And it makes us look pathetic. And bad.
"But it's one of those crazy moments. And we had to say to him: 'Sorry, you've got to go back.' Poor old Bassong had to go back to Tottenham. But it goes beyond that. The player now knows he's surplus to requirements at Tottenham. They're going to sell him as soon as they get another chance. So your heart has to be in the right place when you are in the emotional cauldron of a football stadium. And that can be really tough for a player. And we felt we had let him down because our intelligence wasn't good enough that day.
“There are many highs, but when the lows are low, you're letting down a lot of people. A player, his family, supporters - you let down a lot of people when you goof up on your job.”
The Deal: Inside the World of a Super-Agent by Jon Smith is published by Constable