How wrong is this: £3.5 million "Super Agent"

[boro_boy]

If we achieve nothing this season, at least Boro have some claim to fame. We have paid more money to an agent in the course of making a transfer than anyone else.

We paid three million quid to 'super agent' Pini Zahavi in order to get The Yak to the Riverside. In other words we paid 4 million for Yak and 3.5 for his agent.
Zahavi only gets the full whack if Yak plays out his full contract, and the payments are instalments, but nonetheless, we are paying his agent almost as much as we're playing for the player.

I'm not over sensitive about the whole issue of bungs and corruption and agents fees, and all the other black arts that go on in football, largely because whatever walk of life you do business in, there's always someone trying to scam a deal and line their pockets.

But this deal seems to me to be totally ridiculous, if only because no agent has ever done enough work to justify 3.5 million quid to get a footballer to sign on the dotted line, but also because if we had been able to deal directly with the player, we'd be 3.5 million better off.

Some players don't even have agents, preferring to do all the deals themselves with the help of advisors they pay out of their own wages. Clearly, it's the more bright players who do it that way. You're average dunce footballer couldn't tell net from gross, but at the very least, it would make sense for a player to hire an advisor or agent and pay him a fee or wage out of his own money, rather than the club having to do it. I wonder if a player would be a little more circumspect about the work that his agent was doing if he had to write the cheque himself.

The fact the Gibbo is having to shell out £3.5 mill, that we could well use elsewhere, to an agent for a couple of days work a couple of years ago is just sickening. I know we're all supposed to just accept it as part of the modern game but I can't shake the feeling that it's somehow wrong. Would the Yak not have come to the Boro without Zahavi's work? We can't know for sure but the wages and deal he got would be likely to be bigger without the agent because we could pay him some of the agents extraordinary fee. He could easily have employed a lawyer or advisor to consult on the contract - it wouldn't have cost him 3.5 million quid. We still wanted to sign him. He would have still got a gig.

The agent's fee has now gone out of football and into Zahavi's distant bank account, and there's nothing we can do about it but think of the good it could have done if spent in grassroots football locally. That's where such lavish expenditure on something so worthless really hurts.

Would it be possible for the Boro or any club not to deal with agents? To say to players we'll talk to you about your deal, and you can consult whoever you want about it, but we're not dealing with any third parties and we're not paying the people who you employ any money. Would it put people off coming to us? I doubt it. There's not exactly a queue of top players waiting to turn up at the Riverside as it is. Maybe if we did, it would help us avoid signing players for whom the money is the be all and the end all.

Maybe it wouldn't make any difference in the long run, but at least we wouldn't be quite so directly involved in the greedy hoovering up of cash by agents like Zahavi and players would have to take responsibility for their own money. Neither of those thing would be a negative development.

How can anyone get 3.5million for a deal? This is another reason why we pay high ticket prices. Shocking really.

[cliffy]

I didnt think gibbo would be stupid enough to pay him that being the buisness man he is. ridiculous