January 2019 Transfer Window Rumours/Thoughts | Page 45 | Vital Football

January 2019 Transfer Window Rumours/Thoughts

Agents are like a fire. Give them fuel and they will burn bright.

I suspect putting intricate detail on social media is like lowering the fuel rods into the the reactor pressure vessel.
 
Interestingly (to me at least) James Milner has never used or had an agent, he uses the free legal advice given by the PFA and negotiates his own deals. Makes sense to me, if you are negociating say a £150k transfer and 3 year deal on £250k a year, the agent is probably walking away with £80k that you as an individual could get yourself by arguing that the club isn’t having to pay the agent.

Lazy. But that is the youth of today for you.
 
Interestingly (to me at least) James Milner has never used or had an agent, he uses the free legal advice given by the PFA and negotiates his own deals. Makes sense to me, if you are negociating say a £150k transfer and 3 year deal on £250k a year, the agent is probably walking away with £80k that you as an individual could get yourself by arguing that the club isn’t having to pay the agent.

Lazy. But that is the youth of today for you.
'Youth of today'? How long have "agents" been around in football?
 
Agents were used by most English clubs in the 1880s and 1890s particularly when recruiting from Scotland as fans didn't take kindly to their best players moving south. Club officials often faced physical violence when trying to sign players. The FA introduced a rule change in 1899 banning clubs from making direct payments to agents. The better agents were then employed directly as scouts. It is only in relevantly recent times that the football agent has made a come back.
 
The imps have been around since 1884. Players come and go. I am sure we will sign some in the correct mould.

2 more days for a certain players recall expiry
 
'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.
 
Agents were used by most English clubs in the 1880s and 1890s particularly when recruiting from Scotland as fans didn't take kindly to their best players moving south. Club officials often faced physical violence when trying to sign players. The FA introduced a rule change in 1899 banning clubs from making direct payments to agents. The better agents were then employed directly as scouts. It is only in relevantly recent times that the football agent has made a come back.

http://www.worldbhc.org/files/full program/A6_B6_ATESSARIGROSSI_WBHCpaper.pdf

This paper gives a potted history of European football agents and backs up your summary.

- From the late 19th century till the late 1950s: scouting and intermediation on the behalf of clubs
- From the early 1960s till the mid 1990s: the representation of football players
- From the mid 1990s to the present: the professionalization of football agents.

So professional agents have come to the fore with the rise of post-Bosman player power.

It always comes down to money though. Where there's a flow of money, there's going to be someone trying to get rich from it. There was far less money in football in previous decades, so the conmen were sticking their fingers in shady businesses elswhere.
 
Just had a look at the Peterborough squad for todays game and Mark O`Mara isn`t in their squad,
So do you think that is because we will be signing him, as I think his agent was the problem that was holding things up for both teams.
 
I said much the same in the match thread. His form since December also a major concern.
Im not sure its a major concern. He seems to have lost a yard of pace so needs to adjust his game until it comes back. Anderson has had periods like it and look at him now.