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Very interesting article here from today's Sunday Times about football"super agent" Jon Smith :
Football
[h=1]Secrets from the life of a football agent[/h]Face-offs with Fergie and wrestling with Wenger: Jon Smith has seen it all — and then some
Jonathan Northcroft
September 4 2016, 12:01am, The Sunday Times
Full of surprises: Jon Smith explains in his new book why a player might take a year out in Belgium, and why Arsenal rely on a warehouse in Cambodia
Jon Smith marked his 40th birthday with a very big bash, taking over Wembley Arena, and for his 50th he staged a five-a-side football tournament in which Geoff Hurst played in goal. He had a “huge” party on his 60th too. On his 30th? “I was on my own,” he says. “I was alone in my home in LA and didn’t see anyone.”
Smith, then, was lost in grief after the death of his first wife, Lee, from leukaemia. A millionaire by 29 through the music industry, he felt he had achieved his working ambitions. He had no children to live for, just a dog. “I disappeared,” he admits. “Every drink was an alcoholic drink, to dull the pain. There was no real raison d’être.”
He rebuilt from there, marrying Janine, becoming father to Ross and Scott and founding a new sports management company, First Artist, that helped to pioneer modern football agency. He and his brother, Phil, grew First Artist to a behemoth that diversified into theatre, events and financial services and turned over £103m, employing 300 at its peak — then, having overextended, it plunged to within 12 days of collapse when he sold up in 2010.
Tough cookie: “Fergie told it straight, he knew what he was doing”, says Smith
A life of vivid highs and some dreadful lows; of great fun, ambition and success, but also challenges and colourful scrapes. All, with engaging honesty and Smith’s smiling charm, is detailed in The Deal, his part-memoir, part football industry exposé.
On one page, Smith is at the mercy of gun-toting hoodlums in a disused factory as a deal in Ukraine goes badly wrong; on another he is in the Liverpool dressing room with Robbie Fowler’s jockstrap on his head. Here is a book that bounces along with all the twists, quirks and surprises of a transfer deadline day — with the same serious human undercurrent too.
Smith might appreciate the analogy. He helped to create the Premier League, after all, and also happens to represent Jim White, the face of deadline day coverage on Sky Sports. The pair had lunch recently. White’s Sky contract was up: let’s renew, they decided, but Smith said, “Let’s go one better! Let’s do another deal!”
He wants his book to educate football fans about the hidden business machinations behind even mundane aspects of their sport. Ever wondered why certain managers — he cites Arsène Wenger as one example — wait until after the 60th minute to make substitutions? “A lot of contracts are configured with bonuses. Bonuses for playing, bonuses for times of playing,” Smith explains.
“You get reports saying someone’s on £100k a week. He probably isn’t. He’s probably on £60k and then there will be bonuses of £30k if he’s in the starting line-up, £20k if he comes on after 60 minutes. The interesting thing for me is to watch these games and think ‘is that a football substitution or is the manager saving himself and his club £50k by putting players on in the 75th minute rather than at the start of the second half?’
“I don’t think it’s at the forefront of the manager’s mind but I think it’s part of the equation. Likewise, there might be a player he really wants to encourage, who he knows is on a bonus contract. So in the 90th minute they go on as a substitute — go on son, get on the field and earn yourself 20 grand.”
Look out, he says, for a certain transfer in January; if it comes off as he expects, it will look incongruous but stem from a business strategy. There is a young English player, who he will not name but who can be guessed at, who almost moved between two middling Premier League clubs last week. The would-be vendors wanted more than £20m and the prospective buyers were £2-3m off with their bid.
Come January this player will be in the last six months of his contract and, as he is under 24, free to negotiate a move abroad. He will go somewhere like Belgium for a compensation fee of about £400,000. “He’ll have a year there to ply his trade and then come back for circa £10m-£15m. The buying club will have got him cheap, his wage deal will be enhanced by a few million because there’s a smaller transfer fee and his agents will end up with circa £4m, £5m, £6m.
“Some fans won’t like it but from an agent point of view I’d say that’s putting together a clever deal. It’s like buying and selling currency, or corporate transactions, and the fees [intermediaries] get in those would be sizeably more than £5m. With transfers, we’re talking human flesh, we’re talking footballers. Which people still can’t envisage as corporations. But some footballers are mini-corporations.
In the headline deal of the transfer window, Paul Pogba’s world-record move to Manchester United, Pogba’s agent, Mino Raiola, picked up a seemingly outrageous commission of about £20m. But, again, Smith wants fans to look at the industry dynamics behind the number. “I don’t have a problem with it,” he says. “Raiola put 10 years into that guy. He gave him his life. He earned him a fortune. The system is the system.
“If the system allows him to take £20m or £18m or £22m, whatever the figure is, then he can say to Man United this you’ve got to pay. And if the player says ‘yeah, I want him to be paid that,’ then that is the price to pay. I don’t feel anything other than respect for Raiola for being able to do it.
“I don’t know Pogba but you’ve got to be there day and night. You’ve got to go to the nightclubs and the restaurants and dig your player out of holes. And it’s every day, twenty-four-seven.”
Then there is the unseen financial investment agents make in young players. “It’s like golfing agents have to buy their players on to tours,” says Smith. “Inevitably, to begin with, you have to fund a player’s lifestyle. You have to help them buy cars. Sometimes buy their parents houses. Very often these days to sign a 16-year-old player, the parents come to you and say ‘well, we want 50 grand’.
Specs on: “Raiola spent years with Pogba. Why shouldn’t he get £20m?” argues Smith
“And the longest you can sign them for is two years. That 50 grand… suppose the kid’s no good, suppose they leave you — because players can walk out of the contract at any time. When we had hundreds of players I didn’t get a life. I could have sold for more money — I was 59 but I loved my family and missed them. I poured a lot of time into my sons, but I had to fight to get them into my life. Whereas one phone call from one of your players and you drop everything. If I’m away with the family on holiday, inevitably I have to come back. It’s a very unforgiving business.”
But enjoyable. One of Smith’s contributions to English football was bringing back ideas from America about sport: fun and entertainment should always be central. The Deal generates smiles. Helped by close relationships with Bobby Robson and players such as Paul Gascoigne, Smith pushed the commercial envelope with the England players’ pool at Italia 90: he knew he was going too far when he began seriously scheming ways to get Sonic the Hedgehog on to England’s substitutes’ bench.
He simply enjoys the colour of negotiating with football’s characters. Sir Alex Ferguson “told you how it was, absolutely straight. You knew you were in the presence of someone who’d listen — but knew exactly what he was doing.”
Smith represented Gary Pallister in Pallister’s then record £1.9m transfer from Middlesbrough to Manchester United. The deal was done in a pub car park at Scotch Corner. “Like a scene from Gunfight at the OK Corral,” Smith says. Ferguson and [Boro manager] Bruce Rioch stepped out of their cars. Rioch saw Smith and told him: “You … f*** off!” Ferguson told Rioch: “He’s going nowhere, he’s with us.”
And Daniel Levy. When Smith once had to haggle over an unpaid £50,000 fee, Levy agreed to pay — on condition First Artist bought a box at White Hart Lane. The price? £48,000. Phil Smith asked: “Does it have to face the pitch?”
“It has a warehouse in Cambodia full of files and stats. Every player on the planet. They crunch every conceivable number relating to a footballer. Examples are Hot Streak Bias versus Confirmation Bias; if the left-back attacks and creates chances, how many chances does he allow the opposition by pushing on?”
Every potential signing is assessed this way — and via similarly complex financial modelling. The approach is why Arsenal often take so long in transfer windows to act, or make quixotic, over-literal bids such as £40,000,001 for Luis Suarez, Smith believes. “I love Arsène but if I’ve got a criticism it’s that he’s corporately standoff-ish. He lets the system play out and I think Arsenal’s system slows him down.”
Stats are all very well but what about the stuff inside a player, his motivation, his capacity to improve, his personality? “Computers can’t legislate for the human spirit,” says Smith. His career, and his fun company, teaches you that, yes, football is a business — but a people business. And even agents are human too.
The Deal: Inside the World of a Super-Agent by Jon Smith is published by Constable on Thursday
Football
[h=1]Secrets from the life of a football agent[/h]Face-offs with Fergie and wrestling with Wenger: Jon Smith has seen it all — and then some
Jonathan Northcroft
September 4 2016, 12:01am, The Sunday Times
Full of surprises: Jon Smith explains in his new book why a player might take a year out in Belgium, and why Arsenal rely on a warehouse in Cambodia
Jon Smith marked his 40th birthday with a very big bash, taking over Wembley Arena, and for his 50th he staged a five-a-side football tournament in which Geoff Hurst played in goal. He had a “huge” party on his 60th too. On his 30th? “I was on my own,” he says. “I was alone in my home in LA and didn’t see anyone.”
Smith, then, was lost in grief after the death of his first wife, Lee, from leukaemia. A millionaire by 29 through the music industry, he felt he had achieved his working ambitions. He had no children to live for, just a dog. “I disappeared,” he admits. “Every drink was an alcoholic drink, to dull the pain. There was no real raison d’être.”
He rebuilt from there, marrying Janine, becoming father to Ross and Scott and founding a new sports management company, First Artist, that helped to pioneer modern football agency. He and his brother, Phil, grew First Artist to a behemoth that diversified into theatre, events and financial services and turned over £103m, employing 300 at its peak — then, having overextended, it plunged to within 12 days of collapse when he sold up in 2010.
Tough cookie: “Fergie told it straight, he knew what he was doing”, says Smith
A life of vivid highs and some dreadful lows; of great fun, ambition and success, but also challenges and colourful scrapes. All, with engaging honesty and Smith’s smiling charm, is detailed in The Deal, his part-memoir, part football industry exposé.
On one page, Smith is at the mercy of gun-toting hoodlums in a disused factory as a deal in Ukraine goes badly wrong; on another he is in the Liverpool dressing room with Robbie Fowler’s jockstrap on his head. Here is a book that bounces along with all the twists, quirks and surprises of a transfer deadline day — with the same serious human undercurrent too.
Smith might appreciate the analogy. He helped to create the Premier League, after all, and also happens to represent Jim White, the face of deadline day coverage on Sky Sports. The pair had lunch recently. White’s Sky contract was up: let’s renew, they decided, but Smith said, “Let’s go one better! Let’s do another deal!”
Smith wants his book to educate football fans about the hidden business machinations behind even mundane aspects of their sport
So Smith put something together with talkSPORT and though it was run-of-the-mill compared to representing Diego Maradona, taking Andriy Arshavin to Arsenal, running the England players’ pool, marketing Ruud Gullit and so many other things he has done, Smith talks excitedly about what he pulled off for his client. “I’m a complete deal junkie,” he concedes. “I’m 64 and haven’t grown out of it. I love a deal.”He wants his book to educate football fans about the hidden business machinations behind even mundane aspects of their sport. Ever wondered why certain managers — he cites Arsène Wenger as one example — wait until after the 60th minute to make substitutions? “A lot of contracts are configured with bonuses. Bonuses for playing, bonuses for times of playing,” Smith explains.
“You get reports saying someone’s on £100k a week. He probably isn’t. He’s probably on £60k and then there will be bonuses of £30k if he’s in the starting line-up, £20k if he comes on after 60 minutes. The interesting thing for me is to watch these games and think ‘is that a football substitution or is the manager saving himself and his club £50k by putting players on in the 75th minute rather than at the start of the second half?’
“I don’t think it’s at the forefront of the manager’s mind but I think it’s part of the equation. Likewise, there might be a player he really wants to encourage, who he knows is on a bonus contract. So in the 90th minute they go on as a substitute — go on son, get on the field and earn yourself 20 grand.”
Look out, he says, for a certain transfer in January; if it comes off as he expects, it will look incongruous but stem from a business strategy. There is a young English player, who he will not name but who can be guessed at, who almost moved between two middling Premier League clubs last week. The would-be vendors wanted more than £20m and the prospective buyers were £2-3m off with their bid.
Come January this player will be in the last six months of his contract and, as he is under 24, free to negotiate a move abroad. He will go somewhere like Belgium for a compensation fee of about £400,000. “He’ll have a year there to ply his trade and then come back for circa £10m-£15m. The buying club will have got him cheap, his wage deal will be enhanced by a few million because there’s a smaller transfer fee and his agents will end up with circa £4m, £5m, £6m.
“Some fans won’t like it but from an agent point of view I’d say that’s putting together a clever deal. It’s like buying and selling currency, or corporate transactions, and the fees [intermediaries] get in those would be sizeably more than £5m. With transfers, we’re talking human flesh, we’re talking footballers. Which people still can’t envisage as corporations. But some footballers are mini-corporations.
“If the system allows him to take £20m or £18m or £22m, whatever the figure is, then he can say to Man United this you’ve got to pay. And if the player says ‘yeah, I want him to be paid that,’ then that is the price to pay. I don’t feel anything other than respect for Raiola for being able to do it.
“I don’t know Pogba but you’ve got to be there day and night. You’ve got to go to the nightclubs and the restaurants and dig your player out of holes. And it’s every day, twenty-four-seven.”
Then there is the unseen financial investment agents make in young players. “It’s like golfing agents have to buy their players on to tours,” says Smith. “Inevitably, to begin with, you have to fund a player’s lifestyle. You have to help them buy cars. Sometimes buy their parents houses. Very often these days to sign a 16-year-old player, the parents come to you and say ‘well, we want 50 grand’.
Specs on: “Raiola spent years with Pogba. Why shouldn’t he get £20m?” argues Smith
“And the longest you can sign them for is two years. That 50 grand… suppose the kid’s no good, suppose they leave you — because players can walk out of the contract at any time. When we had hundreds of players I didn’t get a life. I could have sold for more money — I was 59 but I loved my family and missed them. I poured a lot of time into my sons, but I had to fight to get them into my life. Whereas one phone call from one of your players and you drop everything. If I’m away with the family on holiday, inevitably I have to come back. It’s a very unforgiving business.”
But enjoyable. One of Smith’s contributions to English football was bringing back ideas from America about sport: fun and entertainment should always be central. The Deal generates smiles. Helped by close relationships with Bobby Robson and players such as Paul Gascoigne, Smith pushed the commercial envelope with the England players’ pool at Italia 90: he knew he was going too far when he began seriously scheming ways to get Sonic the Hedgehog on to England’s substitutes’ bench.
He simply enjoys the colour of negotiating with football’s characters. Sir Alex Ferguson “told you how it was, absolutely straight. You knew you were in the presence of someone who’d listen — but knew exactly what he was doing.”
Smith represented Gary Pallister in Pallister’s then record £1.9m transfer from Middlesbrough to Manchester United. The deal was done in a pub car park at Scotch Corner. “Like a scene from Gunfight at the OK Corral,” Smith says. Ferguson and [Boro manager] Bruce Rioch stepped out of their cars. Rioch saw Smith and told him: “You … f*** off!” Ferguson told Rioch: “He’s going nowhere, he’s with us.”
And Daniel Levy. When Smith once had to haggle over an unpaid £50,000 fee, Levy agreed to pay — on condition First Artist bought a box at White Hart Lane. The price? £48,000. Phil Smith asked: “Does it have to face the pitch?”
Stats are all very well but what about the stuff inside a player, his motivation, his capacity to improve, his personality?
The brothers are Arsenal fans. The Deal is fascinating about the club. Wenger is Smith’s friend and, to some extent, hero, but, “Arsenal are an example of how business and sport cohabit and the fans find that difficult to understand.” Arsenal, under Stan Kroenke, are basically an American corporation run for profit. Do not underestimate, says Smith, the influence on recruitment of StatDNA — a Chicago company the club bought four years ago.“It has a warehouse in Cambodia full of files and stats. Every player on the planet. They crunch every conceivable number relating to a footballer. Examples are Hot Streak Bias versus Confirmation Bias; if the left-back attacks and creates chances, how many chances does he allow the opposition by pushing on?”
Every potential signing is assessed this way — and via similarly complex financial modelling. The approach is why Arsenal often take so long in transfer windows to act, or make quixotic, over-literal bids such as £40,000,001 for Luis Suarez, Smith believes. “I love Arsène but if I’ve got a criticism it’s that he’s corporately standoff-ish. He lets the system play out and I think Arsenal’s system slows him down.”
Stats are all very well but what about the stuff inside a player, his motivation, his capacity to improve, his personality? “Computers can’t legislate for the human spirit,” says Smith. His career, and his fun company, teaches you that, yes, football is a business — but a people business. And even agents are human too.
The Deal: Inside the World of a Super-Agent by Jon Smith is published by Constable on Thursday
