With the revelation that they paid £5.5m to agents last year, Manchester United have creaked open a door which was always locked, bolted and boarded up; however, as our eyes grow accustomed to the light, we're beginning to realise how dark and murky it still is inside. United's new practice of publishing payments confirms the huge sums dished out: the £1.2m United agreed to pay Ruud van Nistelrooy's agent, Rodger Linse, for negotiating the Dutch striker's five-year contract in January, on top of £468,000 they still owe him for doing the last one, was the most eyecatching in a startling table of figures.
With this little knowledge, though, we want to know more, most obviously: how many outlandish millions are other Premiership clubs paying agents? We don't know because not one is prepared to follow United's lead and tell its fans. Left to pick over United's figures, they pose one particular puzzle: what are the agents actually doing to be paid so much? If you talk to agents and clubs, it soon dawns that to negotiate a way to any answers, we must throw out any outdated ideas of the agent as a gnarled, streetwise, older guy, negotiating for a naïve young player with football clubs which have a shameful history of exploiting their labour, the player paying his agent 10 per cent for the service. United still host a character from those very early days when footballers, only freed from the illegal maximum wage in 1961, gradually took on agents to help lift their earnings.
Harry Swales was one of the first, being Kevin Keegan's commercial agent in the Manchester City manager's playing heyday of perms and Brut adverts. Swales is still there today, representing Ryan Giggs, Old Trafford's first young star of the Nineties' moneyed era. One element was probably true back then but still needs clarifying: clubs pay agents. Players don't pay them, even for negotiating their contracts.
The agents sit down opposite the clubs, negotiate massive packages from them, then the clubs pay the agents for the service. That is not all. Even the idea of what an agent is needs reclassifying. United published only a list of players they signed, such as Kleberson, Christiano Ronaldo, Eric Djemba-Djemba and others; those whose contracts were renewed, such as van Nistelrooy and Darren Fletcher; and players who were sold, such as Diego Forlan and Juan Sebastian Verón. In every case, an agent was paid, but United do not say what for. Two of the deals involved more than one agent.
The Argentinian defender Gabriel Heinze, signed for £6.9m, generated £525,000 to two agents: Robert Rodriguez, representing Heinze; and the French agent Bruno Satin, working for United in negotiations with Paris St-Germain. When United signed Louis Saha from Fulham in January, they paid Saha's own agent, Branko Stoic, £250,000 for negotiating Saha's contract, and gave £500,000 to the Israeli agent Pini Zahavi, the embodiment and apparent maestro of modern agents. Still called an agent, Zahavi, whose first deal brought Avi Cohen from Maccabi Tel Aviv to Liverpool in 1979, in fact represents few players here, only Rio Ferdinand, Aiyegbeni Yakubu and Eyal Berkovic. Zahavi makes his real money being paid by clubs as a middle man to put transfers together. The details of this are generally closed, but I can shine some light on the Saha deal. When Saha and Stoic began to agitate for a move late last year, Mohamed al-Fayed, Fulham's chairman, was adamantly opposed to selling Fulham's star striker and refused to talk to David Gill, United's chief executive. Gill called on Zahavi, who has built a career on treating football as a global business of human talent flows, an industry in which building and nurturing relationships is all.
The Saha transfer was smoothed with the involvement of Philip Green, the Monaco-based owner of British Home Stores, who is a friend of Zahavi's. Sources close to the deal told me that Zahavi worked on Fayed to open a door. Saha was in a public strop, wanting away, he would be a free agent before too long, Fulham were in debt, and slowly talks began. If he were to even think of letting Saha go, Fayed wanted plenty of money, so Zahavi negotiated with United to see how many millions were available. After six or seven weeks, the parties were prepared to look at each other. Philip Green flew David Gill to Monaco in a private jet; there Gill met Fayed and the deal was done: £12.825m in total from United. For his services, Zahavi was paid £500,000.
Manchester United confirmed that David Gill had flown to Monaco in Green's jet; Fulham dismissed the story as inaccurate. Green told me: "I talked to David Gill and to Pini and took David to Monaco when Mohamed was there. I didn't know where they'd got to in the deal, but I helped them to finish it up." One agent told me: "People think chairmen call each other and agree deals. It isn't like that. There is often deadlock, because of ego, the price, whatever. Agents open the doors - but remember, we are only paid for success, and many deals don't come off."
Jon Holmes began representing players at his local club, Leicester City, in 1972 when just a handful of men, like Ken Stanley, acting for George Best, were starting to ply this trade. Holmes rose to prominence with the sometime Leicester hopeful, Gary Lineker, and is now a partner in SFX, one of England's leading player agencies, with Michael Owen among its clients. A traditional agent representing players, he is exasperated by many aspects of what he calls the "wild west", weakly regulated, agents' free-for-all, including the involvement of middle men who emerged here when international transfers became more widespread. "They are brokers, not agents, and shareholders and fans should really ask clubs what these people do and why somebody cannot be employed at clubs to approach other clubs and do deals."
Yet even where a single agent is involved, clubs, it turns out, very often make two payments, one for "facilitating" a deal and one for negotiating the player's contract. United paid Paul Stretford, Wayne Rooney's agent, £1m, rising to £1.5m, partly for negotiating Rooney's deal and partly for bringing his player to United. This may look a blatant breach of the rules maintained by football's world governing body, FIFA, that agents must act for only one party to a transfer, but, as I reported then, the Football Association told me the rules are not interpreted to forbid such twin payments. When Alan Smith joined United from Leeds in May, his agent, Alex Black, was paid £750,000 for "acquisition of the player and negotiation of his contract".
Black, one of a new breed, a graduate with a Masters in sports management, confirmed this week he was indeed paid twice by United: "We worked for United to help negotiations with Leeds. Then we sat down and represented Alan Smith on his deal. As long as the payments are separate, there is no conflict of interest." This, though, is a somewhat artificial distinction, even if United are making it assiduously. At many clubs, agents conclude a deal and are simply paid a fat fee.
In recent years, the Inland Revenue has taken a very keen interest in agents' fees, arguing that as the agent has worked for the player, the player is receiving a taxable benefit if the club picks up the payment for him. United are at pains to accept that and state that their players will pay tax on that part of the fee. However, at other clubs, where no tax has been declared, the Inland Revenue's Special Compliance Unit is understood to be in deep discussions with players, agents and the clubs themselves about the possibility of back tax being owed to them. This little we know now: football agents are paid mighty commissions on huge sums of money, often earned as middle men, because chairmen won't, or don't, talk to each other. Players' agents are paid by clubs simply for agreeing to sit down and extract millions from them, then paid for that too.
United published the figures after it was caught in the crossfire over the Rock Of Gibraltar racehorse between Sir Alex Ferguson and his Irish former friends, the United shareholders John Magnier and JP McManus, who lobbed in 99 questions attacking United's payments to agents, including Ferguson's son, Jason.
Publication invited us to pile in, and this week we duly did, ridiculing the country's richest club for outrageous waste, challenging Gill to justify his own handsome salary if it does not include handling all aspects of transfers. This, however, is progress: at least United, alone, admit it now.