Clubs told to leave agents to the players

The chairmen of every Premier League and Football League club will receive a letter this week calling on them to refuse to employ agents. Enclosed will be a report entitled The role and regulation of agents in football by three academics for The Sports Nexus, an independent research organisation.

It makes 23 recommendations, the most important and radical of which is that agents should act not for clubs but only for players, who should then be responsible for paying them. The Professional Footballers' Association should undertake the basic work required in all transfers, while the agent concentrates on representing the player in his demands.

"They are, after all, players' agents," the report says. "Cases in which they have been involved in corruption or rule-breaking have often been when they have been working for clubs. Indeed, there is a suspicion that a club might employ an agent precisely for the purpose of rule-breaking, for example to tap up a player. Clubs often pay the agent even for work done on behalf of the player. This is in effect tax evasion by the player and should be outlawed."

Other recommendations that could find support include a "fit and proper person" test for agents, already advocated by Uefa; and agents to supply a detailed account of services provided, together with hourly rates. Clubs are less likely to agree to a demand for making public all players' salaries.

The report cites in detail two controversial transfer deals, involving Harry Kewell and Wayne Rooney. It emerged in a High Court libel case that when Leeds United decided to sell Kewell instead of allowing him to leave for nothing the following year, Liverpool were always his choice. "Leeds," says the report, "seemed to have little need to employ an agent to broker a deal." But despite the clubs agreeing a fee of £5m, Leeds paid £2m of it to Max Sports, the firm employing Kewell's "personal manager", Bernie Mandic, who was not a licensed agent. Mandic said the money was for work done on Leeds' behalf in Australia.

The Football Association referred the case to Fifa because of the "alleged involvement of a non-licensed agent" and "the international element of the transfer", but two years later Fifa finally handed it back on the grounds that the transfer was not an international one at all.

Because Manchester United briefly publicised agents' fees, it became known that when signing Rooney from Everton, after outbidding Newcastle, they not only paid Paul Stretford's Proactive Sports agency £1m for "the acquisition of the player" but paid the same company £500,000 "for negotiation of [Rooney's] terms". This appeared to break the Fifa and FA rules that an agent may represent only one party in a transfer. But the FA said there were two different elements to the Rooney transfer: the sale to United and the negotiation of his personal terms. The Nexus report asks: "If the player had made the choice [to join United], why does Manchester United require the services of an agent?"

Phil Snape of The Sports Nexus says a chance for reform was missed when the Football Association rewrote their rules on agents in January. "They had the opportunity to prevent clubs paying agents, but they ducked it," he said. The Premier League subsequently agreed not to pay agents' fees when buying a player, but can still do so when selling. According to Jon Holmes, the chairman of the SFX agency, one change to regulations paradoxically made matters worse: "Premier League clubs won't now pay an agent for renegotiating a player's contract. But that's crazy, because all it does is encourage the agent to move the player on to another club."

The Premier League are holding an inquiry into corruption, giving Lord Stevens, the former Metropolitan Police Commissioner, the power to investigate every transfer since January 2004. That will not include one of the more bizarre ones revealed in a new book by Gordon Strachan from his time at Coventry. The agent involved offered to take the Coventry chairman's notes on his client's wages to the club secretary for typing, and quietly changed all the fives into sixes and the sevens into eights.