CHAPTER 4

How to Become a Football Agent: Practical Examples

It is not possible, if not from a normative point of view (for which reference is made to the precise reading of the previous Chapter 2), to delimit the boundaries of this profession. In this chapter, however, given his personal professional experience on the subject, the author wants to give a critical and as concrete point of view as possible in the real fulfillment of this activity, trying to answer to the questions which, over the years, have been more frequently placed on him.

The routine of the sports agent is characterized in most of his professional day, by an unspecified series of “contacts” or “connections” with different figures in the world of football: sports directors, technical directors, presidents, commercial area managers and/or club marketing, clients, new, old, and potential. Clients are not only football players, but also coaches and more distantly, entire clubs that directly request the professional services of a specific agent/agency for certain tasks. Moreover, the key role played by the trust component in carrying out this activity is evident, given that the management figures of the clubs who interface with these professionals will then be professionally judged by the management of their home club, based on sporting, promotional and turnover that the market meetings with these professionals will have produced.

Trust, it was said then. It is precisely this component that acts as a distinction between a good agent and a mediocre agent. In fact, the companies will be increasingly inclined to reach Their agents by telephone, by e-mail, with meetings in person, or through some of their members (coaches in primis) rather than using the occasional performances of new agents met perhaps at some meeting organized by third parties.

How to Build Trust: Networking

One of the cinematographic milestones of this activity is a film, now somewhat dated (1992), about the figure of the sports attorney. The title of the movie is Jerry Maguire and a young Tom Cruise, the protagonist, played the role of the young prosecutor.

[Jerry Maguire] “I even remembered the words of the greatest sports attorney, my mentor, the great and late Dicky Fox who said:”

[Dicky Fox]: “The secret of this profession is relationships, personal relationships.”

The scenario I’m going to present here is something that really occurred to me with a Serie A club complaining on my mobile phone the impossibility of recruiting an athlete that I had, with my work team, brought from the United States to play in Italy.

Giulio, I need you to resolve immediately this thorny situation ... otherwise, you know, the athlete A.M.1 that you represent … we must get it started. We cannot keep an athlete who cannot play in the squad!

The present case concerned the non-granting of the ICT (International Transfer Certificate), which was normally the complete prerogative of the two sports federations of reference within a transfer, which should have had a dialogue with the two clubs (transferor and buyer).

Well, in this and other similar situations, I realized that what is (often) clearly foreseen by the federal and international regulations that I had long studied to obtain the license from FIFA, is often not respected in practice. As in any intellectual profession, however, the unexpected is just around the corner.

With my friend and American partner of Sports Management Worldwide, Dave Knibbs, we had already agreed on everything before. Percentages, commissions, and steps to be followed scrupulously in carrying out the transfer of A.M. were in place; Dave was my only trusted contact in the field of women’s football in the United States, his agency representing several national footballers, from different nations of the world. The United States, not just any nation for woman football; therefore, the intention to maintain good relations was and must be a priority, especially when it is not me, the football agent, who created a slowdown in the negotiation.

Dave, like all Americans, was not used to this kind of blame game made of “It’s the club’s fault,” “No, it’s the federation’s fault,” or “It’s the agent’s fault.” Given the fact that the latter assertion in this case must necessarily be incorrect, given the lack of competence in ICT matters of the agents, the problem was there, and it was real. The English FA, the last federation in which the athlete had played, had not released the ICT and was unable to dialogue, due to “unknown” problems, with the buying club in Serie A.

Let’s go back to the quoted request that was addressed to me:

“Either you give us a hand (and you will be the best ... nd), ‘or the transfer skips’.”

The further problem, if we want, is that the client, whatever role she or he holds, from coach to player, doesn’t matter who is to blame. In any case, if the transfer fails, YOU will be the agent not sufficiently capable of making it. So what? Trivially, your client will seek a contractual resolution with you or will wait for the natural expiration of the mandate contract with the agent to go and seek fortune from others.

Of course, painted like this, this profession seems to be really tailored to cynical, unscrupulous people who only look at the best offer. And perhaps in part it is. But this fortunately is only one side of the coin. Completing the anecdote above, it was clear that the outcome of the transfer depended on the concrete opportunity to find some friendly infiltrator in the FA, at Wembley, who could help me.

And like the sword of justice, we agents draw our best instrument of attack and defense, which is our cell phone. I quickly scroll through the address book, meanwhile the cellular network did not work much, which in itself is strange in a hyper-technological London where the cell phone often and willingly takes also in the Tube, when I usually go to my office in Covent Garden. With the return of the line, I remembered one of my very first London friends whom I met in 2013 on one of my first trips to the UK. He, a man in his 60s, called Ian Anderson, is a (former) football agent, in its original meaning. You must remember that Ian has had to deal with exemplary professionals in his career such as George Weah, Taribo West, and Dusan Tadic, among others. Ian used to go to the training grounds of all the major Premier League and Championship clubs. On the contrary, he told me that it was common practice for the agents to stand in the parking lot at the end of training and try to persuade, a little by acting as a door to door salesman, an athlete rather than another to sign with him.

Obviously for me, a child of my time, accustomed to technology, the use of social networking platforms such as LinkedIn and attentive to a scrupulous correspondence via e-mail, his story sounded a bit like a caricature. Or at least certainly not applicable nowadays, where security services, cameras, and clubs are not very willing to receive strangers, make an area like the parking of footballers’ cars inaccessible worse than the Cartier vault where part of the English crown jewels are kept.

But Ian (today, I am proud to have him as a partner in my agency, the “Football Factor of Tedeschi & Partners”), with his usual British style, taught me one of the most important lessons in this activity: no telematic contact, however immediate, can ever replace physical contact. The meeting in person.

Among other things, when I obtained my FIFA license in October 2013, I was lucky enough to go, through a family friendship, to the office of some sports lawyers, to try to practically learn how to carry out this activity. The CP, FC, and RR lawyers, whom I will always thank, told me about one of their clients, at the time holder of the Italian mayor national team, who had chosen to work with them because one of the lawyers had taken him out to get “croissant and cappuccino, and he had paid for everything!,” the player almost marveling at this gesture. Even I, a very young new FIFA agent, I must say, managed to grasp the teaching only in a nuanced way. Precisely because coming from a middle-class family, I received a similar education. When I can, I offer, offering is a nice gesture, a cuteness. Yet, after years I realize how rare it is. It is simply not done in certain cultures.

Returning to Ian, thanks to him, I was able to obtain the coveted ICT in record time, the commission from the athlete and above all a de facto certification from the purchasing company, which “if we want, we at the Football Factor of Tedeschi & Partners can reach everywhere.” Yes, precisely this healthy presumption of having tentacular ties to be able to contact any club, institution, personality belonging to the football industry was the keystone for this and other negotiations. If you have a low self-esteem or low self-determination, this is certainly not the right profession for you. Still taking up the aforementioned film Jerry Maguire,

“We live in a cynical world, a cynical world.

And we work in an environment of highly competitive people.”

So be strongly competitive. But how do you become competitive? I have created a pyramid of thoughts that have accompanied me and still accompany me in my professional life (and not only). Three cornerstones that guide my daily actions are:

(1) Professional qualification

(2) Diversification and associations

(3) Networking

Professional Qualification

At the beginning of the book, reading the study done by Rossi, Semens, and Brocard, a percentage struck me particularly.

Overall, 74% of respondents have a university degree. In detail, 41% have a bachelor’s degree, another 26% have reached the master’s level and 7% have higher qualifications at the doctoral level. The high level of education is combined with a good knowledge of the language. Being key figures in the globalization process of football, agents are required to speak foreign languages to operate in the transnational transfer market.

So almost 75 percent of sports agents have a university degree. Strange if the agent’s activity is conceived as that of a practitioner, a person with no particular technical skills, a middleman between clubs and players. It seems obvious that this is not the case. Surely it should be remembered that the peculiar characteristic of the agent’s profession presupposes the understanding of a legal language translated into a contract. This fits in well with the (necessary) knowledge of English, in an increasingly globalized market. To date, among us sector professionals, knowing beyond one’s mother tongue, English, and another language of your choice, is becoming the obligatory practice.

An example of how football is a multicultural and global phenomenon par excellence, I experienced when a club from the top Chinese division contacted us for one of our assistants, an Argentinian. The meeting, at least the initial one, could only take place electronically, with the unlikely coincidence of times between the EU area where I was operating at that precise moment, Argentina where the player was on vacation with family and China.

To make the negotiation more complex, there was also an evident linguistic barrier that the Chinese world has with Latin or European languages. The result of a Western sovereign ideology, the overwhelming power of the English language and its recognition as a mother language in the commercial sphere is something that doesn’t sit well for the Chinese. I was informed of this cultural problem, as well as of their particular way of greeting each other, which is always looking toward the future with the expression “we will hear from you soon,” by my Chinese collaborator, G. Guochen. In China, he is a middleman for clubs. There, as in Qatar or in the United Arab Emirates in general, it is not conceivable at all that an agent who is not presented to the company on duty would propose one or more of his clients.

As in other commercial spheres, in these countries, the way you reach the negotiation is very important. The right presentation of your agency is often essential for the success of the business. Furthermore, South Americans and the Asian world are the polar opposite in the way of understanding football.

In Asia, football is seen in two diametrically opposed variants, without nuances, which never meet: a Chinese club decides to buy a top player (also and above all in terms of merchandising and image) capable of pulling fans to the stadium, otherwise the club decides to focus on the local player (also due to recent government impositions that impose stringent measures on clubs to contain the phenomenon of rampant xenophilia in football, deleterious, according to the Chinese football government, for the entire national football system).

The nuances are typical of us Westerners, and I must say, very useful for us agents to try to move the margins of a negotiation on one side or the other. In Asia, the club makes an offer, which, by inquiring about the history of the player and the agency that represents him, it deems appropriate for the athlete. If the offer is refused, or even worse, if the player (or the coach) is hesitant, the negotiation tends to fail. The club immediately turns its attention to something else and, in addition, feels offended for having only wasted time without really having concluded anything. It is clear that in China, football is not a phenomenon that can be compared with that practiced in Europe or, with due differences, in the States.

In the negotiation that I conducted together with my work team, there are all the elements of a complex school case when you think that South Americans are usually undecided until the end of the negotiation, they tend to get the best price and have a bond very strong with the family, which makes it difficult for the client in question to decide to move from his homeland. In short: it must be absolutely worth it. There is also a peculiarity in the management of these delicate balances between the parties; the Argentines in particular tend to have large families where all the relatives have a say. Therefore, it often happens that, for an athlete who is already of age, he has to convince his father, mother, brothers or sisters, and even relatives of more distant degrees!

Practical tip: in South America, you need a trustworthy person to rely on in the preliminary negotiation with the athlete’s family to prevent any unexpected hitches from proliferating in the middle of a deal conclusion, once the contractual details with the reference club.

As you can see, managing this can be complex. This is why qualifying is necessary. Even if the FIFA regulations do not explicitly prescribe the need for a degree, in many internal national regulations (for example, in Italy and France) the individual national sports federations require the possession of a degree in order to exercise, as a precondition for the presentation of the applicant to become football agents.

As well as, even if not formally required, I believe it is highly recommended to have a legal-normative preparation of the relevant sector discipline, both national (where you will want to operate mainly) and international. Not knowing the FIFA, UEFA, CAF, CONCACAF, AFC, CONMENBOL regulations is clearly a big deficit that will not be tolerated by any interlocutor having to do with the agent.

I will go against the trend of what was written by distinguished colleagues who have made the history of this profession by saying this: yes, the degree and any specialized master are fundamental. It is thanks to a specialist master’s degree at the Football Business Academy in Geneva (Switzerland) that, in a meeting organized at SoccerEX in Miami (that I attended as a master’s candidate) I met my current correspondent from Mexico, Hector Campos, who works in a football territory as complex as fascinating.

Networking alone is not enough. Otherwise I would not have chosen first to follow this path of professionalization. Anyone who wants to sell a product must know about it. And to learn about football, the third sector of the world economy together with entertainment, one cannot have in one’s pedigree only having played football for a few years, perhaps in some lower division, thus having the trained eye to recognize the new Neymar, Ronaldinho, and Roberto Baggio.

Let’s clarify the other concept immediately; to do this job, in 2020, is no longer the agent of footballers but rather The scout that identify the talents. Too often, there is a tendency to mistakenly confuse the two figures, disturbing both professional categories. As it is true that the agent, immersed in contracts, phone calls, business trips, sponsorship agreements for athletes or clubs, does not have the material time to be also on the fields and train himself to recognize the potential new player to be taken into stable, the opposite is absolutely true; the scout in all likelihood will not know any contractual matters, simply because he is a field man, often approached or even paid by football clubs to find new talents.

Studying and working competently is something that pays off. The time of the factotum agent is over. Today, most of us agents decide to become corporatized, constituting themselves as legal persons in an agency, where every person included in the company has a specific role.

Diversification and Associations

My second cornerstone originates from this need for specialization and its diversification. Getting your FIFA agent license in 2013 was very similar to becoming a lawyer. You have officially become an agent (or lawyer) yes, but then you have to begin once again. There are no customers, nor are the channels. Network, if you do not have any family history in the world of football, much less. There are basically two ways, and also, these overlap those you have to follow once qualified as a lawyer:

Look for a dominus, an agent already qualified for years who can guide you, or

Decide to do everything yourself

In whichever of the two paths you find yourself, at the end of the training course, if things have gone well, you will begin to have too many instances to take care of. I said it before and I repeat it, the job of the football agent who lurks in bars or in pizzerias or, as Ian told, in a parking lots, is over. There are now hundreds of tasks to be done every day. Athletes have to be followed in their weekly performances, the agents have to sponsor these performances on social media and put information on websites every week, organize interviews with the media for players or coaches; discuss contract renewals, terminations, and reply to “why the boy plays little? Or, doesn’t play at all?”; find sponsors for extra income or simply to make that sporting figure more known in a certain local context. All this, without thinking about the new opportunities to look for with clubs or potential new customers. What about scouting? How can I, as an agent, understand if a client who knocks on my office door is really valid to be represented by my agency? Here then, diversification and associations are fundamental. It is unthinkable to manage all this workload alone. Football is a global phenomenon, and therefore it is very fast. The football industry spins millions of dollars a year, and this obviously attracts the media, always ready to share news first. The advent of social media has also given, if we want, the final acceleration to this profession.

The moment a player manifests his uneasiness through Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, or similar, if you are his agent, you are already late. The company will soon call you, to ask for clarification on that post or comment that you didn’t even know existed. Associations, I will repeat it to the point of boredom, are necessary. Alone, you don’t go far. With this spirit, a series of figures, both professionals and non-professionals, become fundamental pawns in the chessboard of a respectable agency. With these assumptions, I met and subsequently established a relationship of trust with all the members of my team.

I just mention a few:

Claudio Taglialegne (Head of Recruiting per la Football Factor di Tedeschi&Partners)

It was back in 2014 and I was in Lucca, Italy, when I met Claudio Taglialegne, now head of the agency’s communication and media area. He immediately struck me for his humanity. At that time, Claudio worked for Lucchese Libertas, a club that played in the then Lega Pro (the third Italian division). I was in town thanks to the honorary president of the club, Giovanni Galli, former historic goalkeeper of the A.C. Milan, above all renowned for being a good person of the Italian football. Between me and Claudio, when we met at the training camp while he was filming the first team during training, a mutual trust was born immediately. Two guys who weren’t sons of someone but who simply wanted to enter this world.

Needless to say, Giovanni Galli’s number ended up in the company’s column.

Giuseppe Genovese: (FIFA licensed agent at Football Factor di Tedeschi & Partners)

On September 25, 2013, the day before the FIFA agent exam in Rome set up jointly by FIFA and the FIGC, I found the only friendly face in a sea of sharks. In fact, taking the exam with us, I remember seeing brothers and sons of footballers who played in famous clubs such as AS Roma or AC Milan. Giuseppe, called Peppe, is about 15 years older than me, married and with children. A family business to carry on but the dream to turn his passion into reality. Being a football agent. Unlike myself, the time to study the Italian and international sports justice code system was decidedly reduced for him. But studying together day and night, between work and chat together, Peppe managed to pass the exam brilliantly. He is now the person in charge of recruiting in our company for all of central and southern Italy thanks to a widespread network of contacts that he has managed to weave over the years by also being a part of the local politics. Further evidence of how the football sector is communicating with other aspects of the Italian and world economy. Our first professional athlete went through Peppe and the player, A.G. who then played in important clubs of Italian football such as Avellino, Sampdoria, and Salernitana.

Daniel Sansone: (Intermediary for the Maltese Football Association e official partner della Football Factor di Tedeschi & Partners)

To give rise to a more international project for my business, a citizen of the tiny Malta island intervened. Just him, married to a South American and therefore very passionate about South American football (from where Malta draws a lot for the purchase of talent not originating from the island) also given the decidedly softer and more permissive federal regulation on immigrants toward them if compared, for example, with the Italian or English one.

Daniel was also looking for new connections through the Internet, to try to get out of an island that does not offer much football opportunities. Currently, however, the most interesting prospect is constituted by a real rising star, Haley Bugeia, a Maltese soccer player managed directly by Sports Pro Management and Consulting, in which Daniel works, and who is a partner of the Football Factor of Tedeschi & Partners. She, just 16 years old, was bought by Sassuolo in women’s Serie A, and has already won the award for best player of the month in Serie A in October 2020.

All these examples serve to strongly reaffirm the concept that being agents of footballers is not (anymore) as it was in the past—an activity with an extremely personalistic connotation. If it is done at a high level, the activities in this profession must be scrupulously divided among all the social groups.

Networking

Third and last element that I consider fundamental in carrying out this profession is certainly the Networking activity. This term from the new generation, is actually much more dating back so as to be attributable to the very beginning of the profession of agent. Create your own, recognizable and personal network. A network of trusted contacts is the only way to enter a market sector that is, after all, quite closed, however fast and volatile the nature of every single operation carried out by market operators is. But it is precisely in this volatility of the operations that the constant driving force of this activity lies. A continuous turnover of interpreters that guarantees an opening of the market potentially to an infinite number of new players.

The channels to be exploited are infinite; potentially even going to a restaurant to eat a sandwich you can find people interested in interacting with the football apparatus, perhaps by sponsoring small clubs or in more restricted cases, entering the club’s social structure. Football is a socio-cultural phenomenon that indissolubly binds all the cultures of the world. Suffice it to say that in the aforementioned United States, the NBA or hockey country par excellence, in New York, precisely on the facade of a huge New York-style brick building, there is a mural of Mohammed Salah, the champion of Liverpool and the Egyptian national team. Or again, that the Brazilian ace Pele has decided to open, also in Times Square, his football store, the “Pele Soccer.”

I believe that networking, in turn, can be classified into three different types:

Network through Social Media: In this globalized football, the use of Social Media becomes necessary in the Networking activity. Through LinkedIn, for example, a social network specialized in creating a meeting point between job demand and offer between professionals, I personally had the opportunity to get in touch with professionals of the caliber of world champions Gianluca Zambrotta and Fabio Cannavaro or Bernardo Corradi, former footballer of Lazio and Inter. But the power of social networks, if channeled well, does not end with these high-sounding names. In fact, entire clubs increasingly decide to embrace virtual platforms as a means of meeting new market opportunities, and the reason is soon understood; zero costs in economic terms and very low in terms of time. You only answer who you want, eliminating unnecessary pleasantries. So, for example, with my agency I came in contact with the L.B. member of the technical staff of the Brisbane Roar FC team, a militant club in the Australian top league, where illustrious players such as Robbie Fowler and Alessandro Del Piero have played in various capacities, in a rather recent past. A single large global network that crosses national borders is now possible by endlessly expanding the possibilities of finding new frontiers of entrepreneurial development.

Networking in the old way: surely it is and remains the preferred modality for us agents. Being inserted in certain contexts such as family ones, directly through common friendships, already breaks down the first barrier, that of trust. This is a system that still works a lot in Southern Europe and Latin America. Indeed, we can say that if you are not introduced by the right person, that particular professional sportsman does not get there, or you get there when it is too late. Networking in the old way, however, is affected by the endemic problem of society in which today’s football insists; haste. You must always be fast, arriving often before others is essential for the success of a negotiation or simply to establish good relationships before others. Managing different careers going from house to house has become complex.

Networking through official channels: Conventions, gatherings, exclusive meetings are often useful for us agents to get to know the people officially in charge of a task for a specific club. In recent years, the Wycout Forum, a meeting for clubs and agents by now famous all over the world organized worldwide by an Italian company (the brand was recently acquired by Huddle, an American), has been affirming itself, which allows with a sort speed dates to meet more potential clients within two days of work; and SoccerEX, not exclusively reserved for agents, with three editions a year (Europe, USA, Asia) where hundreds of football related companies meet investors and businessmen for possible job opportunities.

How to become a football agent? From this chapter, I believe, we can draw a useful series of ideas, food for thought, and practical cases, which, connected, give rise to two key concepts: networking and professionalization. By themselves, these requirements may not be enough, it always takes a massive dose of luck as in all businesses.

Londoner Richard Brenson, historic founder of the Virgin Group said: “Business requires decision-making cunning and leadership, discipline and capacity for innovation, but also predisposition, irony and, dare I say, luck.”

1 These initials are fictional to preserve the privacy of my client.

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