Football should tell Haaland and Co to f**k off
Paul Macdonald
- 19 Apr 2022 09:44 BST
- 5 min read
If football was working as it should, Erling Haaland should be persona non grata.
The Norwegian forward has for a long time been the most exciting, dynamic, prolific centre-forward available - but don’t he and his agent know it.
READ MORE: The true transfer values of football's biggest stars
Haaland’s attitude to the perennial interest in his situation has been one of supreme arrogance and needless self-promotion; everyone already gets it, Erling. You’re good. A constant game of cat-and-mouse isn’t doing anything other than making sure his agent and father extract more than the maximum value from any deal.
Haaland has in the past bemoaned his status, saying: “I have said from the beginning that I want to focus on football because that is when I am at my best, not when other things come into my mind.
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“They [Dortmund] have put on pressure for a while. So it is time to get things started. All I wanted to do is play football, but I can’t do that now.”
That is not the plan now, was never the plan before, and it’s dishonest for any of them to suggest otherwise. When you hire Mino Raiola as your agent you ultimately make a statement, and that statement is not just to maximise your value, but to gouge your way through the game, collecting bags of money in the process.
Raiola has said in the past that he “knows very well what value my players have and what the clubs need”. And yet it’s in these very actions, of keeping everyone guessing, of keeping his clients asking for unreasonable demands, that sets the transfer agenda. His clients will think him a Very Good Agent. The rest of football is sick of it.
Raiola is not the only one, far from it. He’s just the most vocal and most immediately dislikable of all of them. But even by his standards, the alleged demands to prospective clubs in order to secure Haaland is bordering on the laughable.
Haaland deal shows agents are too powerful
The transfer fee is likely to be his release clause, which will be €75 million this summer, plus an astronomical salary for Haaland himself. The Daily Mail reports that Man City have agreed a deal which will see Haaland earn €602,000 per week, or €31m.
So far so expensive, but when you throw in a reported €55m payment owed to a combination of Raiola and Haaland’s father, Alf Inge, and the deal descends into the realms of fantasy.
Such is the position that FIFA have allowed agents to cultivate that embarrassing offers like this can be tabled, all while the agent and his cohorts laugh at its ludicrousness, knowing nothing can be done about it. FIFA effectively deregulated the industry in 2015 and put in a soft cap of 3% on agent commissions, but it was completely unenforceable, was never used, and went largely ignored by the entire industry.
What’s more, an even seedier underbelly of untracked, unvetted individuals permeated the space, effectively meaning the current transfer market has little or no protections for players, or clubs, and is the perfect place for agents to do whatever they like.
Football must react
No wonder, then, that FIFA has moved to introduce more stringent caps on commission based largely around a player’s salary, and act to create a transfer clearing centre where each and every euro spent within a deal is accounted for.
But wouldn’t it be lovely if football, as a collective, just decided that there would be no more of this intolerable behaviour from an elite few who are, contrary to what they may claim, not protecting their clients - like a vast majority of agents do at the opposite end of the spectrum from these deals.
In fact, they are simply laying out a series of tests. Can I get away with this? Can I get paid for that? Can I make a bidding club make this concession? Can I ultimately extract as much money as humanly possible from the entire football pyramid, whilst passing it off as market value or some other spurious nonsense?
And this is the secondary product of having state-owned clubs - primarily Manchester City and PSG - within what should be a working marketplace. If other clubs decided enough was enough, these entities - that don’t understand the meaning of competition, or rules - would instantaneously break the picket line to give Raiola’s fat pockets exactly what he desires. And therein lies the problem of the situation we currently find ourselves in.
Agents and their associated fees extracted €600m from football in 2019 alone. That’s money that clubs scrape back from ticket prices, from merchandise, from the cost of our TV subscriptions, from everything that we personally fund.
And so wherever Haaland ends up, his dad and his agent will get their big payday, and they’ll be laughing at that club’s fans in the process, who are quite literally footing the bill. Haaland is not Messi: wouldn’t it be good if we all just told them to collectively go away?
Read more about: La Liga, Serie A, Bundesliga, Ligue 1, Premier League, Barcelona, Bayern, Chelsea, Dortmund, Man City, Man Utd, PSG, Real Madrid, Erling Haaland
