Multi-Agency Groups in Football
When Consolidation Becomes a Conflict. (3/3)
The consolidation of the football agency market into a smaller number of increasingly large and powerful entities and groups raises questions that go well beyond market economics. As the previous piece in this series explored, the conditions in which genuine autonomy, for players, managers/coaches, clubs, club officials, agents and smaller operators alike, can be eroded are already present and in some respects already operating. What follows is the part of the argument that makes those conditions more concrete.
Corporate Consolidation
The agencies and corporate entities seemingly driving this consolidation are not necessarily villains, and it would be a mistake to characterise them as such. Consolidation through merger, acquisition and absorption is a pattern seen across many industries, from media and entertainment to finance and professional services, and the commercial logic behind it is well understood. Strengthening market position, expanding client rosters, pooling resources and extending geographic reach are entirely legitimate business objectives, and the football agency world is no different from any other in pursuing them.
What is notable, and what warrants serious attention, is the scale at which this has now occurred in the world of football/soccer agency. For example, the mergers and/or acquisitions that saw American giant CAA bring together the UK behemoths Base and Stellar under the CAA ‘umbrella’, each of which were already individually amongst the most significant agency operations in European (if not world) football, represents arguably the biggest concentration of football agency influence seen in the sport to date. Others, including the likes of USG, Roc Nation and WMG, have pursued similar expansion through varying combinations of merger, acquisition and collaborations, each at their own scale and through their own commercial logic. The regulatory framework governing the football agency market has not so much failed to address this, but as with so many aspects associated with football agency, has struggled to keep pace with the speed and complexity of commercial developments it was not originally conceived to anticipate.
An Alarming Combination
Such concerns regarding MAGs become considerably more acute when agency consolidation of this kind intersects with a separate but related development in the football ‘industry’: the existence of direct shared business interests, and in some reported cases interrelated shareholdings, between prominent agency operations and football club ownership groups.
This goes well beyond the longstanding and familiar dynamic of a club official or sporting director maintaining a close working relationship with a particular agent. It is worth noting that if asked to name the most significant agency operations in European football, many informed observers would likely arrive at the same names: CAA Base, CAA Stellar, Gestifute and WMG (who have similarly undertaken their own mergers, acquisitions and collaborations within the agency space); and as already mentioned the first two now effectively operate under the same ‘umbrella’.
Gestifute and its principal Jorge Mendes (a name synonymous with football agency), has been the subject of widely reported shared business interests and reported intersecting shareholdings with Fosun International, the ownership group of English Premier League club Wolverhampton Wanderers (Wolves). That relationship was sufficiently well documented to prompt formal investigations by both the EFL and the FA; as a result of which both bodies cleared the arrangement, concluding that because the relevant shareholding was held not directly by Fosun but through a company owned by its chairman, it did not technically infringe the applicable rules. Whether that conclusion addressed the substance of the concern on agent-related matters or merely its legal form is, to put it carefully, a question the rules themselves were seemingly not equipped to answer, and that is precisely the point.
Where a MAG (Multi-Agency Group) of significant scale operates within or alongside such a structure, the compound effect across multiple clubs, multiple clients and multiple transactions (as well as the wider football community) represents a concentration of potential influence that existing regulations were simply not conceived to address. It is not a question of whether any individual chooses to exploit those conditions, but more so whether the architecture exists to address and/or manage it, whether they do or not.
A Parallel Worth Drawing
It is worth considering whether a potential parallel with multi-club ownership is applicable here. UEFA’s regulations restricting clubs under common ownership from competing in the same competition exist precisely because the threat to sporting integrity posed by such arrangements is real, recognised and sufficiently serious to require a regulatory response. The concern is not that every multi-club ownership group (MCOG) will act improperly, but that the structure creates conditions under which improper influence becomes possible, and that sporting integrity demands those conditions be addressed rather than tolerated.
When a MAG of significant scale intersects with a multi-club ownership structure, those two sets of conditions compound one another in ways that the existing regulatory framework, already stretched in addressing each concern individually, is seemingly wholly unprepared to manage. The broader integrity implications, including the potential for competition manipulation, gambling irregularities, manipulating the transfer market (and subsequent transactions) and other forms of misconduct that football’s own governing bodies have long identified as existential threats to the sport’s credibility, are not beyond consideration in this context either.
The measures required are not straightforward or simple, however they are neither obscure nor beyond reach. Stronger and more genuinely enforceable agent regulations and conflict of interest rules that reflect the market as it actually operates currently and in the future rather than as it operated a decade ago, and more cohesive, transparent tracking and reporting of transfer activity and the relationships between the parties involved, would all represent meaningful steps in the right direction.
Whether the will to implement them exists among those with the authority to do so is, as with so much in football governance at present, a rather more open question.
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