David Conn writes:
Paul Stretford, Wayne Rooney's agent, was paid by both Rooney himself and Manchester United for his role in delivering the 18-year-old striker to United from Everton this week. Of the £1m paid to Stretford's Proactive Sports Management agency - rising to £1.5m if Rooney stays at Old Trafford for five years - part was paid by Rooney, for Stretford negotiating the terms of his £50,000-a-week contract, and part was paid directly by United, for Stretford bringing Rooney to sign for the club.
Deals where both a club and a player pay the same agent for working on a transfer seem to scream of potential conflicts of interest. There is no evidence that Stretford did anything other than negotiate the best deal for Rooney. However, in such a situation there could be a risk that because the agent stands to profit financially from having his player join that club, he could go easy in the contract negotiations, not fight fully for his player, to make sure the player signs.
The rules on agents' conduct, as set out by football's world governing body, Fifa, and administered here by the Football Association, state, apparently clear as crystal, at Article 14: "A licensed players' agent is required to represent only one party when negotiating a transfer." This is one part of the often mysterious agents' world perhaps best understood by the wider football public: an agent cannot work for both parties because that amounts to a glaring potential conflict of interest.
However, if supporters conclude that Stretford's role in Rooney's transfer, for which he was paid by both sides, clearly breaches those rules, they would apparently be mistaken. The FA told me this week that the way Fifa applies its rules leaves the way open for agents and clubs to operate like this.
United's new practice of transfer glasnost, in which they publish a breakdown of money paid to the selling club and to agents, which followed the furore over the extent to which Sir Alex Ferguson's son, Jason, had been paid by United for working on transfers, has lifted a very helpful lid on the way the football industry conducts its transfers.
In an apparently innocuous section of the official statement United released on Tuesday, the club said of the £1m-£1.5m they are paying Stretford: "Fees payable to Proactive Sports Management Ltd in relation to both acquisition of player and negotiation of personal terms."
Phil Townsend, United's official spokesman, put some flesh on the bones of that sentence. Take the second element first: negotiation of personal terms. That is the standard work of agents as supporters understand it. Stretford sat down opposite United's chief executive David Gill to wrest from him the £50,000 a week plus performance-related trimmings in Rooney's new, fat contract. Rooney has agreed to pay his agent a proportion of the deal as his commission, between five and 10 per cent according to Proactive. To save United writing Rooney a cheque which he immediately has to pay out to Stretford, United, for convenience, pay Stretford directly. That is common practice.
But then there is the first element of the payment to the agent: "acquisition of player". Townsend explained that United had agreed to pay Stretford directly for successfully bringing Rooney to United, separate from the money Stretford was also to get for negotiating Rooney's contract. The way this worked shines a very revealing light on the conduct of transfers, and agents, in this country.
Rooney's transfer, which left Everton fans shell-shocked this week, is a saga with plenty of background, but it moved astonishingly quickly in the fortnight before the transfer window closed last Tuesday. Gill had said earlier in the month that United were not interested in signing Rooney now, and the club are adamant they were going to wait until January, the next transfer window, to make a bid.
Then, 10 days before the August deadline, Newcastle United suddenly announced a £20m bid for Rooney. That is another controversial episode, given Newcastle's chairman Freddy Shepherd's friendship with Stretford and the fact that his son, Kenny Shepherd, works for Proactive out of an office in St James' Park - and has 88,000 shares in the agency. Another potential conflict of interest some might think, but all sides - Newcastle, Proactive and Manchester United - maintain the Newcastle bid was genuine and that the Shepherd connection was irrelevant.'
The rest of David Conn's article can be read on The Indie's website:
http://sport.independent.co.uk/football/comment/story.jsp?story=558075
Conn concludes with an observation that demonstrates how obscene the world of football finance has become:
'The nation's most exciting young footballer has moved at 18, spattered by tabloid revelations and with an injured foot, after just 40 full appearances, and 27 as substitute, from the club he and his family have supported all their lives, to world football's richest plc, for a fee rising to £30m. He has the big house and the lucrative contract, and Paul Stretford, whose "Player Representation Division" turned over £4.5m in the whole of 2002-03, has pulled off a guaranteed £1m fee, for his work done in the last couple of weeks, paid by both sides. This, we are told by all involved, falls squarely within the rules, and is the way things are done these days.'
United's willingness to publish the details of the fees paid to agents has drawn criticism from some sections of the media, in a saner world this newly discovered openness would build pressure on the authorities to ensure that all clubs follow United's lead. Until the authorities do act agents, players and the odd manager will continue to profit from the confusion created in the shadows.