Post by QPR Report on Dec 4, 2009 9:03:55 GMT
Telegraph/Jim White
Football agents go where even the best players fear to tread
The other week Jimmy Greaves told a story that gives an insight into the way football used to work. It concerned his old Tottenham colleague Cliff Jones, who returned to the club after an international break glowing with pride.
Wales had just played Brazil, Jones had been man of the match and the Cardiff press had been rapturous. "The best winger in the world," one of the papers called him, while another described him as "The Welsh Pele".
Thus armed, he told his team-mates that he was going to demand a pay rise. Surely he was worth an extra fiver a week now he was being compared with the greatest exponent of the game.
Sport on television Greaves recalls that the rest of the team wished Jones luck and told him they would be in the pub over the road from White Hart Lane, waiting for him to report on his negotiations.
It was no more than 10 minutes before he joined them. Apparently he had walked into Bill Nicholson's office and presented his case, slapping the headline about him being the best winger in the world on to the manager's desk to reinforce his point. Nicholson did not even look up from his work to address the player.
"Best winger in the world?" the manager said. "That's their opinion. Not mine. And it's mine that counts. Now get out."
Except he didn't say get out. And that was the end of the discussion. Jones, lauded as the equal of Pele one moment, was dismissed with withering abuse by his manager the next. Greaves himself, incidentally, never even dared put a case to Nicholson. As a result the most gifted predator the English game has ever produced never earnt more than £100 a week.
"That was the thing that disappointed me most," says Greaves. "Bill Nick, Ron Greenwood, all the top managers I worked under had played the game, they knew how badly we were rewarded. Yet when it came to being in a position to do something about it, they were the opposite of sympathetic."
It is worth remembering Greaves and Jones when hearing that the Premier League clubs paid £70 million in agents' fees last year. Sure agents are the merchant bankers of the game, third parties peeling off vast sums for doing not much more than oiling the wheels of negotiation.
And yes, it is true that £70 million could be much better spent sprucing up facilities to enable inner city youngsters actually to engage with the game. Except, were agents not involved in football, does anyone seriously think that the money would be gifted down to the grass roots?
Historically those who run football have never willingly handed over a penny more than they can get away with. Which is why agents are involved in the first place.
If footballers had not been routinely disadvantaged by their paymasters through the years, then the moment real money entered the game there would have been no cause to seek an outside party's help in accruing their share of it. But as Jones proved, footballers' skills lie in kicking and heading a ball, not in financial negotiation.
Young, naïve and undereducated, they need help. And just as few actors, singers or writers would consider themselves equipped to conduct their own business, so footballers employ outside expertise.
Ashley Cole may indeed be as greedy as the terrace taunts insist, but is he really any less entitled to hire someone to look after his best interests than his wife is when she sets about sorting out terms for the next series of X Factor? Yet it is only in football that the presence of agents is routinely used as evidence of moral decline.
True, where football does diverge from the rest of the entertainment business is that it is not the player who pays the agent, it is the club. Still, the clubs only have themselves to blame for this bizarre arrangement.
They created the circumstances in which parasites would prosper and then, after they had been invited in, meekly surrendered to their terms. It is a bit late now to be complaining that the bill always lands on their desks.
Mind you, life could be a lot more uncomfortable for our football clubs. In the revelations this week about who pays what to whom, Jermain Defoe emerged as a rare player who does not use an agent. Cliff Jones's successor at Tottenham prefers to use a far more formidable force to press his case: his mum.
You suspect that if Mrs Defoe had been around to unleash a handbagging in his day, even Bill Nicholson might have looked up from his paperwork.
www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/leagues/premierleague/6719500/Football-agents-go-where-even-the-best-players-fear-to-tread.html
Football agents go where even the best players fear to tread
The other week Jimmy Greaves told a story that gives an insight into the way football used to work. It concerned his old Tottenham colleague Cliff Jones, who returned to the club after an international break glowing with pride.
Wales had just played Brazil, Jones had been man of the match and the Cardiff press had been rapturous. "The best winger in the world," one of the papers called him, while another described him as "The Welsh Pele".
Thus armed, he told his team-mates that he was going to demand a pay rise. Surely he was worth an extra fiver a week now he was being compared with the greatest exponent of the game.
Sport on television Greaves recalls that the rest of the team wished Jones luck and told him they would be in the pub over the road from White Hart Lane, waiting for him to report on his negotiations.
It was no more than 10 minutes before he joined them. Apparently he had walked into Bill Nicholson's office and presented his case, slapping the headline about him being the best winger in the world on to the manager's desk to reinforce his point. Nicholson did not even look up from his work to address the player.
"Best winger in the world?" the manager said. "That's their opinion. Not mine. And it's mine that counts. Now get out."
Except he didn't say get out. And that was the end of the discussion. Jones, lauded as the equal of Pele one moment, was dismissed with withering abuse by his manager the next. Greaves himself, incidentally, never even dared put a case to Nicholson. As a result the most gifted predator the English game has ever produced never earnt more than £100 a week.
"That was the thing that disappointed me most," says Greaves. "Bill Nick, Ron Greenwood, all the top managers I worked under had played the game, they knew how badly we were rewarded. Yet when it came to being in a position to do something about it, they were the opposite of sympathetic."
It is worth remembering Greaves and Jones when hearing that the Premier League clubs paid £70 million in agents' fees last year. Sure agents are the merchant bankers of the game, third parties peeling off vast sums for doing not much more than oiling the wheels of negotiation.
And yes, it is true that £70 million could be much better spent sprucing up facilities to enable inner city youngsters actually to engage with the game. Except, were agents not involved in football, does anyone seriously think that the money would be gifted down to the grass roots?
Historically those who run football have never willingly handed over a penny more than they can get away with. Which is why agents are involved in the first place.
If footballers had not been routinely disadvantaged by their paymasters through the years, then the moment real money entered the game there would have been no cause to seek an outside party's help in accruing their share of it. But as Jones proved, footballers' skills lie in kicking and heading a ball, not in financial negotiation.
Young, naïve and undereducated, they need help. And just as few actors, singers or writers would consider themselves equipped to conduct their own business, so footballers employ outside expertise.
Ashley Cole may indeed be as greedy as the terrace taunts insist, but is he really any less entitled to hire someone to look after his best interests than his wife is when she sets about sorting out terms for the next series of X Factor? Yet it is only in football that the presence of agents is routinely used as evidence of moral decline.
True, where football does diverge from the rest of the entertainment business is that it is not the player who pays the agent, it is the club. Still, the clubs only have themselves to blame for this bizarre arrangement.
They created the circumstances in which parasites would prosper and then, after they had been invited in, meekly surrendered to their terms. It is a bit late now to be complaining that the bill always lands on their desks.
Mind you, life could be a lot more uncomfortable for our football clubs. In the revelations this week about who pays what to whom, Jermain Defoe emerged as a rare player who does not use an agent. Cliff Jones's successor at Tottenham prefers to use a far more formidable force to press his case: his mum.
You suspect that if Mrs Defoe had been around to unleash a handbagging in his day, even Bill Nicholson might have looked up from his paperwork.
www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/leagues/premierleague/6719500/Football-agents-go-where-even-the-best-players-fear-to-tread.html