Agent Group Solicits Donations to Sue FIFA Over Transfer Limits
A series of rules changes would restrict the money — sometimes tens of millions of dollars in a single deal — that agents can earn when players switch teams.
An organization representing some of the world’s biggest agents has written to its members and urged them to contribute to a fund for what it expects will be an “expensive” legal fight to block proposed FIFA regulations to cap the fees they earn in the multibillion-dollar soccer player transfer market.
The Association of Football Agents, a trade organization for intermediaries in Britain, home to global soccer’s richest transfer market, issued an emotional appeal to its members in the wake of the plans revealed earlier this week that would severely restrict the money — sometimes tens of millions of dollars in a single transaction — that agents can earn when players switch teams.
The new rules are set to be ratified by FIFA’s leadership at a meeting in Shanghai on Oct. 24.
The A.F.A., whose board members include the representatives of Real Madrid forward Gareth Bale and the former Arsenal manager Arsène Wenger, told its members that FIFA had “totally reneged” on commitments to consult the group before making a final decision. The letter sent to its agents and intermediaries included details for a bank account collecting donations toward legal fees in case the group goes to court to contest FIFA’s new rules.
“This is going to be an expensive fight and we need your moral and financial support,” read the letter, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times.
FIFA’s proposed limits on agents’ fees — part of a broader set of changes to the transfer market — come amid growing public pressure to regulate the $7 billion a year player trading market. FIFA’s president, Gianni Infantino, expressed a desire to curb excessive behavior by some agents upon entering office in February 2016. Months later, leaked documents revealed by the hacking platform Football Leaks detailed how the Italian-Dutch agent Mino Raiola secured more than 40 million euros in payments by representing all three parties — player, buying club and selling club — in Paul Pogba’s world-record transfer to Manchester United from Juventus in August 2016.
Mel Stein, the A.F.A. chairman, said in an interview Friday that FIFA was trying to “punish” agents for deals like the one involving Pogba, which he said was “atypical.”
Under the proposed rules, the fees paid to agents representing selling teams in a player’s transfer would be capped at 10 percent. The cap would be 3 percent for those acting for buying clubs and for intermediaries acting on behalf of players. Agents also would no longer be able to work for both buying and selling clubs in the same deal, a measure designed, according to FIFA, “to protect the integrity of the system and prevent abuses.”
“There has been a consultation process with a representative group of agents so their inputs could be taken into account,” a FIFA spokesman said in response to the A.F.A. letter. “The Task Force Transfer System has kept an open dialogue with agents on all aspects of the proposed reforms.”
As well as writing to its members — a group that the A.F.A. said accounts for collective annual revenues of 500 million pounds (more than $615 million) — the group also has written to FIFA to warn it that the agents would begin legal action within seven days if the proposals were not abandoned.
“We cannot accept any regulations that provide for capping of our fees or restrict our freedom to act for any party in a transaction,” the A.F.A. wrote to FIFA. It described the regulations as “unlawful and anti-competitive.”
According to data released by FIFA, agents earned more than $2 billion in the five years from 2014 through 2018, a figure that dwarfed the amount paid to teams as part of a separate so-called solidarity mechanism designed to reward youth development programs for their roles in producing players.
Stein, the A.F.A. head, accused FIFA of “breathtaking arrogance” for failing to engage with his group before making a final decision on its new rules, and suggested the excesses of soccer leaders were worse than any found in his industry.
“Have you been to their offices?” he said of FIFA. “All that marble and gold, that’s taking money out of the game.”
Controlling agents’ growing influence in the global marketplace has been a struggle for FIFA since the value of the transfer market — and the prices for top players — began to grow exponentially amid a television revenue boom that began in the 1990s. As part of the proposals FIFA will consider next month, it will take responsibility for licensing agents, a role it gave up about a decade ago. At the time, it acknowledged that the task, on a global scale, was beyond its capabilities.
Peter Kenyon, a former chief executive of the Premier League giants Manchester United and Chelsea, suggested actors in the soccer industry would be able to find ways of getting around the new rules, as they have done when it comes to other forms of regulations. He noted that it was not agents who determined the fees paid for players, but clubs.
“Nobody has to pay an agent anything — that’s a club decision and they choose to pay it,” he said. “Clubs are great at wanting someone else to make a regulation that makes it easier to say no.”
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