'Youth of today'? How long have "agents" been around in football?
I remember Mark Lawrenson talking about the scurge of agents maybe 15 years or so ago. The story he told went something like this.
I was training in the morning at Brighton and Jimmy Melia called me over and said, “Mark, I don’t want to sell you but we’ve had a bid from Liverpool for you and the least i can do is tell you and let you speak to them, you need to get to the grand hotel in Liverpool at 7 tonight to meet Bob Paisley” so Mark left training and on his own at his own cost got the train from brighton to london, got the tube accross town then a train to Liverpool, got to the reception at the grand and said I’m here to see Bob Paisley, he was asked to wait in reception. bob came down the stairs in his slippers shook Marks hand and said, do you want to play for Liverpool? mark said yes, Bob said ‘report for training at Mellwod in the morning and we’ll sort your contract’ with that he went back upstairs, Mark checked in the hotel, found his own way to training the next morning, trained in borrowed boots and then signed the contract after training.
He then won 5 championchips, 3 League cups, 1 FA cup, 1 european cup, 2 Super cups and 3 charity shields.
As he said, Football was about winning things.
Different era we are in. There are probably over a 100 premier league footballers that have never played first team football but are multi millionaires and won the square root of F@*k all.