‘Trust me I am a Football Agent’. The discursive practices of the players’ agents in (un)professional football

Abstract

While the public and media attention is largely focused on the corruption scandals of high officials in international football, FIFA's decision in April 2015 to deregulate football agents raises further concerns about its ability for self-regulation and governance. FIFA's introduction ( 2006) and subsequent updating (2008, 2015) of its regulations and legal frameworks governing the activity of agents in professional football has important implications on the inner workings of international football. In this regard, FIFA's decision to deregulate the industry is perhaps a reflection of the neoliberal influences surrounding the organisation to let the agents govern themselves and deal with the wrongdoings of the alleged bribery, exploitation and trafficking of young players. However, the deregulation of agents by FIFA can also be seen as the organisation's inefficiency to maintain the primacy of selfregulation and self-governance in serious matters of the industry, such as agents' global leadership and regulation of practices. This paper, using primary qualitative data collected from players, agents and managers from professional football leagues in the UK and Ireland, aims to uncover the unethical, extremely complex and deceptive sides of the agents' industry. By doing so, it aims to emphasise the need for gold standards of practice and leadership in the regulation of international football, which desperately needs to restore its integrity. Two key issues are unpacked: (i) the alleged (un)ethical behaviour of football agents that provokes so much hostility in the football world; (ii) the power shift(s) from clubs and managers to agents and players and the implications these may have on the ethics of the business practices in football.

Why are There STILL No Gay Professional Association Football Players in Men’s Major Leagues? Revisiting the Views of Football Fans in the United Kingdom

“…Because agents' earnings are linked directly to those of their clients, they are conservativeif for no other reason than they have no interest in changing a profitable arrangement. Consequently, within the player/agent relationship, tension exists between the necessities of economic activity, and the social, physical, moral and self-development of the player (Kelly & Chatziefstathiou, 2018).…”

The contemporary football industry: a value-based analysis of social, business structural and organisational stakeholders

“…However, agents, as third-party owners, have substantial control over clubs and players, and sometimes they can cause conflict issues (Kelly, 2017), increasing their bargaining power and adopting abusive market power behaviour (Rossi, 2018). Besides, agents are often suspected of corruption in the form of match-fixing (Kelly and Chatziefstathiou, 2018).…”

Football agents from the perspective of their clients: services, service evaluation, and factors that create satisfaction

“…To date, academic work addressing issues concerning the market for football agents has focused only marginally on the relationship between agents and players themselves. One study, by Kelly and Chatziefstathiou (2018), focused on how football agents are viewed in the English football market. The authors interviewed 25 players, 5 agents, and 20 managers regarding their opinion concerning agents.…”