FOUNDATIONS OF SPORT MANAGEMENT
Essay #2
TOPIC: SPORTS AGENTS

By, Christos Balafoutis

Date: 10/20/2010

Nowadays, becoming a good athlete depends on having a good agent in most of the professional sports. A sports agent is a person who procures and negotiates employment and endorsement contracts for a player. In return, they receive between four and ten percent of the playing contract and ten to twenty percent of the endorsement contract although this figure varies based on their own negotiations with the sports figures. That means that sports agents, make good money.

A sports agent is a person who helps market athletes or products associated with that athlete to promote an athlete's career. Agents are responsible for all communications with team owners, managers, coaches and other individuals to help promote an athlete's career. Primarily, agents are used to broker and negotiate contracts for their clients. Also, they are responsible for making recommendations in regards to their options. In addition to finding incoming sources, agents often handle public relations matters for their clients. In some large sports agencies, such as IMG, Creative Artists
Agency and Octagon, agents deal with all aspects of a client's finances, from investment to filing taxes. Sports agents may be relied upon by their clients for guidance in all business aspects of life, and sometimes even more broadly. For example, hockey agents start recruiting clients as young as 15, allowing the agent to guide the athlete's career before the NHL draft, which happens usually at 18 years of age. Some agents are part of large companies and some are on their own. The number of clients an individual agent can handle and how many his or her employing agency can handle in total are interdependent variables. The signed contract is such that the player will receive the full contract amount and the consultant companies then take their income from the adds directly representing the player.

Sports Agents have not been around for a long time. Until the 1970’s, very few athletes had agents because teams would not deal with agents (Masteralexis, 244). Many times players found that having an agent was a disadvantage to them. In some cases, they used for instance their father as agents. Due to most parents' naivety about the sports business, these young athletes were often given less-than stellar contracts by clubs, which yielded lower salaries than they thought they deserved. In Sweden, there were only three licensed agents in
1995. Today, there are 33. As per FIFA(Federation International Football Association), there are
5187 licensed football agents world-wide with 600 agents in Italy alone. Since 2001, agents have not been licensed by FIFA. Instead, agents are licensed directly by each association.

In one hand, many athletes in the past or in the present, lost their job by an agent in different ways. For example, young players with a lot of potential usually hear amazing things from their agents, such as “ You will make a lot of money in the next few years” or “ You will be a great star”. Those words might make an athlete lose his focus from other more important things. On the other hand, there are skillful agents that can really help athletes develop a good sports career. Usually, the more connections an agent has, the better he is. As a result, athletes cannot be sure whether to trust an agent or not; but that’s how things work nowadays which means that without an agent, even If you are a good athlete, a worse than you will take your spot or will make more money because he has an agent.