ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the analysis of players’ agents within the football
industry. First of all, it analyses the plurality of roles played by these
intermediaries and elucidates from an empirical perspective the different
ways in which these functions are fulfilled. This part of the chapter is
analytically structured around the three principal agent tasks: the negotiation
of contracts for players, the scouting of footballers for clubs and the
management of the best-known players’ image rights. It also introduces
FIFA’s new legal framework governing the activity of players’ agents, which
came into force on January 1, 2008 (FIFA, 2008a). The second part of the
chapter addresses the issue of the increasing power acquired by players’
agents in the last 15 years. It gives a brief statistical overview on the
progression of licensed agents and explains why the number of middlemen is
on the rise.
