Not many football agents are interested in their clients as people. They are earning a wage and a player may pay an agent a monthly or annual fee to stay on the books but the big pay off is when a transfer happens and the agent can negotiate a big chunk of it a for services rendered fee. Their client is a just a commodity, a means to an ends and parasite is an apt if unfriendly name for them. It was said by a far better writer than me that evil starts when people treat other people as things. This is exactly what many football agents do. There is nothing wrong with having support when you what to negotiate with an employer. Having someone who knows exactly what to do and can argue your case more efficiently for you is wonderful. Someone to think about what is best for you and won't let an employer take advantage of any friendship and loyalty you have built up with them. BUT It is in a professional agent's best interest to engineer a sale of their clients as frequently as they can get away with. These agents are not supporting the player, or indeed the whole sport. Indeed it damages football so much simply because football is not an individual's sport, it is a team sport and to be successful it demands, trust, loyalty, friendship and total commitment to a joint cause. Rapacious agents aren't just a problem for football and worse than that they are clear demonstration of how sick our current society is at the moment. Now their may be an agent reading this and saying, that is ridiculous that isn't me, I'm a kind caring person, I'm only doing a job, making a living like everyone else. Well here we go. I'm an agent. Not a football one but an entertainment one but the mechanism is the same. Here is the difference though. I work in a co-op, my clients on occasion represent me and any agent fee myself or they get for services rendered is minimal and gets paid to our co-op to pay the business running costs. I get no money for being the agent, and the business pays no dividends, so as a stake holder I get no annual pay out, the business is a not for profit one. So I get the support and help I need in negotiations with potential employers and I provide it for the agency's other clients. Humans are just animals and it is instinctive to survive and in the wild animals kill and domineer to do this. In a civilisation we frown on the killing part but the tactic of domination has free reign and only the practise of friendship and civility has any check on it and in many cases not at all. Civilisation is our attempt at not being mere animals but something greater. Football agents who use people as things are counter to everything we do as a race to be more than just animals. Football is such an attempt. We channel our animal instincts into a sport not a war. We come together and celebrate the game and the competition. Football agents isolate individuals for their own gain and tear apart the group ethic, that celebration of football, that drive to be human and not only animal.
