Do we pay ‘huge fees’ to agents?
Posted on July 12th, 2011 | 28 Comments |
One of the things I picked up on in Workyticket’s transcription of Alan Pardew’s interview is that he (meaning Alan Pardew rather than Worky) claimed we pay huge sums of money to agents as part of any transfer agreement.
What Pardew said was:
“I was listening earlier when you was talking about the money being spent and I just want to sort of make something clear. When you sign someone like Demba Ba and someone like Marveaux there’s huge fees involved in that, it isn’t just transfer fees. This is unfortunately how the Premier League works and a lot of money in those deals doesn’t come back through the system. Ideally, in the old days we would sign someone from the Championship and it would go back into the English game but this money’s going out through agents and stuff like that.”
So I thought I’d do some investigation to try and find out just how much money is spent on things like agents’ fees.
Fortunately, Premier League clubs have now started publishing these details, the latest of which I could find was from October 2008 to September 2009 and, club-by-club, it looked like this:
| Man City | £12,874,283 |
| Chelsea | £9,562,223 |
| Liverpool | £6,657,305 |
| Spurs | £6,066,935 |
| Wigan | £5,527,548 |
| Arsenal | £4,760,241 |
| West Ham | £3,576,972 |
| Portsmouth | £3,184,725 |
| Bolton | £3,166,611 |
| Everton | £2,008,407 |
| Sunderland | £2,007,040 |
| Aston Villa | £1,708,374 |
| Hull | £1,599,188 |
| Man United | £1,517,393 |
| Blackburn | £1,610,885 |
| Fulham | £1,469,258 |
| Wolves | £1,235,703 |
| Birmingham | £974,982 |
| Stoke | £716,042 |
| Burnley | £468,398 |
These figures include:
- fees paid to agents by clubs for player registrations,
- fees paid to agents by clubs on behalf of players for their own player registrations,
- fees paid to agents during the defined period relating to previous transaction costs that have been amortised over the length of a player contract,
- fees paid to agents by clubs to facilitate the outward transfer of player registrations.
And those fees are paid for:
- domestic permanent transfers,
- international permanent transfers,
- domestic temporary transfers (loans),
- international temporary transfers (loans),
- extension of existing player contracts,
- first professional registration,
- free transfers.
The total for all Premier League clubs for October 2008 – September 2009 comes out at £70,692,513 for 803 separate transactions, so the average amount paid in agents’ fees per transaction is £88,035.
It’s probably fair to assume that since that £88,035 ‘average’ fee includes all the above items, including things like contract extensions, the ‘average’ for pukka transfers is likely to be higher, although your guess is as good as mine as to how much higher.
Newcastle aren’t included in that list because it was created for 2009/2010 Premier League clubs and we were in the Championship at the time, but let’s do a bit of finger in the air extrapolation. Let’s assume that we’d be in the upper-middle part of that table – that would make for about £5m spent by the club on agents’ fees in a season. Let’s be even more generous and call it a range of £5-£8m on middleman costs, which I think is probably overestimating.
But is even my (probably overestimated) guess of £5-£8m per season on agents’ fees a ‘huge cost’ in terms of a Premier League club’s finances? I’ll leave it up to you decide that one!
NUFCBlog Author: Hugh de Payen
I'm a baby-boomer of the punk rock persuasion, currently exiled in Somerset for crimes committed in a previous life where locals keep trying to poison me with something called 'scrumpy'. Hates sprouts, coat-hangers, Cilla Black, ornaments, Steven Seagull movies and 50 Cent (he's not worth 10).
Hugh de Payen has written 634 articles on this blog.
These fees Pardew was talking about are huge to the man in the street, but, in football terms, or to be more exact, in premier league terms we will have spent very little in agents fees etc.
Look at the value of the players we have brought in in relation to the signing on fees of Man Citeh.
If the agents fees are relative to the transfer fee, we have spent next to nothing, probably around 3 mil to agents, add in sign on fees of around 1-2 mil.
If Pards is on around 5g pw (as previously guessed at ) then these fees are huge,but in relation to our available funds we have barely touched it.
The figures are relative to each other and only become huge when taken out of the football context, more spin from the puppet im afraid.
I do think the players we have brought in are better than the ones who have so far left the club so we are as promised making progress, and improving the squad with the money from Judas, but why give the impression we have spent more than we have, and treat us punters like mugs?
I also still think we will bring in another striker who is totally off everyones radar (another Carr gem) who will help us up the league this season.
HWTL