Agents

Negotiating with naked head coaches, bartering shares in Cardiff airport, finding dates with pop stars, there’s little rugby agents haven’t had to contend with in the relatively brief era of professionalism. But in an industry where there are just 700 professionals being served by 115 agents, it’s little wonder they’re always willing to go the extra mile.

In any professional role, one would expect a contract negotiation to involve a bit of give and take, maybe some brinkmanship and possibly even a spot of calling one’s bluff. You may also think that when it involves a rugby club and an agent it would be conducted in a boardroom, there would be an exchange of pleasantries, followed by a discussion about the finer points around a player’s off-the-field commitments to the club.

When Adam Palfrey turned up at Neath in the late 1990s to discuss playing contracts for several clients, he was sent down a corridor and into the changing rooms. He walked in and found legendary coach Lyn Jones waiting for him without any clothes on. He asked if Adam had a problem with that and Lyn stayed in a state of undress while they agreed on terms for the players.

Adam starts laughing when he’s asked to recall the moment. “I wondered if it was designed to put me off because he wanted to get the best possible deals for his club,” he says. “It’s funny talking about it now because you just can’t imagine that sort of thing happening today.” 

Quite. The role of the player agent has evolved since the game turned professional and, in many ways, it mirrors how the sport has changed.

Along with Adam, who is now commercial director at Worcester Warriors, Rugby Journal spoke to Association of Rugby Agents chair and Esportif global director Mark Spoors, as well as Ben Woods, head of rugby at Quantum. 

Together they share experiences of being an agent spanning 25 years – from strange clauses in contracts to becoming an impromptu dating service for single rugby players – but also the factors that have changed the priorities for an agent beyond simply getting the best possible playing contract for their client.

To put it another way, while Ben won’t have to worry about a club adopting a ‘body positivity’ approach to contracts, Adam never had to worry about a player appearing in the nude on social media.

But first, we go back to 1998 when Adam decided to become a ‘Mr Ten Percent’, as agents are often called. For any current agents reading this you may draw the conclusion that operating in an unregulated, free-spending market was either totally awesome, or you will wonder how on earth rugby operated in such a way. Or both. And in some ways, the latter is right.

Adam had a decent career as a player in the 1990s with stints at Cardiff, Newport, Swansea and Neath, while also juggling a career as a chartered surveyor. Then the game turned professional in 1995, which allowed him to focus purely on rugby. 

And even though, as a player, he never signed what would have been considered a big-money deal by the standards operating in Wales at that time (i.e. anything north of £80,000 a year), he always made sure that whenever he moved to a new club he got his friend and former player-turned-lawyer Alan Jenkins to review the contract. 

That made Adam very much the exception to the rule among players in Wales and he realised there was a yawning gap in the market.

In 1998, Adam and Alan founded Total Sports Management (TSM). As soon as word got around the dressing rooms that one of their own had set up an agency to represent players, TSM suddenly had far more clients than it could possibly handle. Welsh front-rowers Darren Morris and Ben Evans were among the first crop of signings. “We went from zero to having 80 players on our books almost overnight,” recalls Adam. “Very quickly we discovered that was far too many people to manage. But we were learning on the go. We did most things on a wing, a prayer and a phone call!” 

At least the players knew Adam would have their back – most of his clients were people he had either played with or against. Although he soon learned that unless you were a star property, most contracts would be presented by a club as ‘take it or leave it.’ “However, we could also see that some of the clauses weren’t great,” recalls Adam, “there wasn’t a lot of protection for players if the club wanted to move them on, and the insurance policies weren’t really as they should be.”

Because there wasn’t a framework of rules and regulations or any sort of requirement to be a licensed agent, coupled with money flooding into the game, it created a perfect environment for the sort of people who give agents a bad name. There is one story of a Welsh player from that time who signed a contract for £100,000-a-year, but the agent managed to take 50 per cent for himself.

An unusual one that Adam was involved in was when he and a club worked together to strike a deal for an overseas player who signed on the proviso that his wife could never know how much he was really earning.

Back then, there was no such thing as a salary cap, it simply came down to whatever a club was willing to pay a player. It also meant sometimes being, shall we say, creative with extra clauses in contracts. That could be anything from a new car to finding a job for a player’s wife. When it came to Cardiff making a bid for former England World Cup-winning lock Simon Shaw, he was offered shares in Cardiff Airport.

Agents would also often work with journalists to get a story out about interest in a certain player from another club. The veracity of such stories would often vary. Sometimes they would be genuine tip-offs, other times they were a tactic to suggest a player was looking for a new club, to prompt a new contract offer from his current team.

Now that players had money, they needed to know what to do with it. “As our business developed, what became obvious was that you needed to provide other services for players,” explains Adam. “You could do the peripheral things, like a boot deal or a new car, but what they really needed was financial advice. So, we brought in companies who could do that.

“Would you buy a house, put it into a pension, set up the player as a company?

“The other thing that became really important was insurance for personal and critical injuries,” continues Adam. “A lot of players were intelligent enough to want clauses put into their contracts so they would get a payout in the event of getting a career-ending injury. That’s virtually impossible to do now. I don’t think an insurance company would even so much as look at such a clause let alone agree to it.”

And obviously it wasn’t just the wise (or unwise) heads they were dealing with.  “We then started to look at younger players and would speak to their parents,” says Adam, “to explain what we would anticipate could happen if their career progressed in the right way. And we created a stable of up-and-coming stars, who were on the pathway to becoming internationals. 

“At that point, they would be too young to sign a contract so you would offer education, cars, insurance… but above all else, we wanted to build up trust with the player’s parents because, let’s be honest, when people talk about or hear about a sports agent they tend to think of somebody feeding off a player’s talent.

“Now, you can see some really good agents operating these days, who know how to mould a career. They don’t necessarily go for the biggest deal first. They look at the club that will be best for that player’s career progression.

“We also started branching out in other sports. When we saw how things were far more regulated in football, that was quite eye-opening. There was an element of ‘the wild west’ about the early days of the professional game in rugby.”

It wasn’t even uncommon for contracts to have a termination clause which could be put into effect at any moment. So, if a new coach arrived and wanted a clearout, players could go on the spot without a payoff.

In the case of Celtic Warriors, all the contracts were terminated because the regional team disappeared following a contractual dispute with the Wales Rugby Union that ended up with the WRU liquidating the Warriors on 1 June, 2004. 

Adam had represented several players who joined the region when it was founded in 2003. “It was a really difficult experience because Leighton Samuel, who was running the Warriors, had put a really good squad together,” he says. “A big part of that was because they were paying really good salaries. 

“Then suddenly it just went pop,” recalls Adam. “I can remember being in the corridor with Leighton and being told that the club was going to be dissolved. We had to speak to all our players who had contracts with Warriors, which was a significant number of lads.

“It wasn’t just about the players or the staff; it was their families as well.

“We had to find new clubs, in some cases that meant moving to England or France to try and get comparable contracts. Yeah, it was a lot of stress for everyone involved.”

Another of the first wave of agents was Mark Spoors. “When I started out in 2002 there were only eight dedicated rugby agents and I’m the only one still left from that era,” says Mark. 

“It’s not an easy industry to get into, as proven by the fact that every year more people come in and want to give it a go, but the fall-out rate gets bigger and bigger. It wasn’t long ago that there were 140 registered agents. Now there are 115 agents registered with the RFU and there are 700 pros to go round. So that gives you an idea of just how competitive this industry has become.”

He decided to become an agent after a brief career as a player came to an end in the early part of this century, following a knee injury. “The reality is that I wasn’t good enough. I had around three sessions at Leicester Tigers Academy at which point they had seen enough.”

Being at Leicester also meant being enrolled in a business and law course along with a group of young players, who became his friends.

“On the back of that course, I got an internship at IMG, the world’s biggest sports agency at that time. I worked for them for free and funded myself by working at a restaurant in the evening. A few of my mates who were making their way in the game back then basically said, ‘Learn how to do the job, if you’re any good, come back and I’ll take you on for a few months. If it goes well, I’ll stay with you.’

“One of them was Lewis Moody,” says Mark. “So that was really the start.”

After IMG, Mark joined a law firm in London that had set up a talent management division. “The first time I sorted out a player’s contract was in 2002,” he says. “I had to meet Dean Richards when he was director of rugby at Leicester. At that time the club was winning pretty much every tournament. I was there to negotiate Sam Vesty’s first contract. He’d just come out of Loughborough Uni and was breaking into the first team.

“So, I’m this fresh-faced agent, who is up against a former policeman, somebody who loves negotiating, at a club that was the best in Europe.

“But we got the deal and Sam is still one of our clients,” he concludes, “so I must have done something right.”

As an agent you also become a player’s confidant, somebody who fixes their problems, sorts out commercial deals, provides financial advice, or in Mark’s case, even finds them a wife. “Ha! Yes, well, I was with Ben Foden one afternoon and I think the telly was on in the background and he sees this woman, turns to me and says, ‘Mate I’d love to go for coffee with that girl’.”

The woman in question was Una Healy who was in the girl group, The Saturdays. Ben’s take on that story is slightly different. He says that Mark asked him about his love life, which Ben described as ‘non-existent’. Then The Saturdays appeared on a music channel. Mark asked if Ben was interested in anyone in the group and the reply was ‘yes, the one in the blue tights.’

So, Mark got in touch with Una’s agent, exchanged details and, before Ben knew it, Mark had sent him a text saying, ‘she’s expecting your call’. 

“The story got out in the press and suddenly I had around a dozen to fifteen clients ringing me to ask ‘do you know Sienna Miller?’ or if I knew whatever the equivalent of Love Island would have been back then. There was quite a range of requests!” laughs Mark.

It was also a rare example of a rugby agent being part of the story. Unlike their high-profile counterparts in football, who can command seven-figure sums when a client moves from one club to another, transfer deals have become virtually non-existent in rugby. 

Gone are the days when the late, great Va’aiga Tuigamala moved for
£1 million (from Wigan to Newcastle in 1997), or even when George Ford commanded a transfer fee of £500,000 (from Bath to Leicester in 2017). Back then, stoking or suppressing rumours about players moving from one club to another would have been part of an agent’s job. That was then, but this is now.

In the wake of the Covid pandemic, Premiership clubs collectively lost around £100 million. That financial fallout resulted in Mark becoming the story again but this time he was in the firing line as the face of his profession, as chair of the Association of Rugby Agents. He took on the role of chair nine years ago. “There was no one who was putting up their hand to take it on,” he says. “I’d been an agent for over ten years, and thought I could add value to the role. I had a great team around me who could take on certain parts of my job. Then suddenly everything blew up two years ago.”

A dispute between the clubs and the agents became public. Clubs had previously paid agents a fee whenever a new playing contract was signed but the clubs were now insisting that the players should pick up the tab because the agent works for the player. 

Or at least that’s the abridged version.

Some agents suggested that doing away with that current structure would create a return to the ‘laissez-faire’ approach to contracts in the 90s.

It’s fair to say the press wasn’t exactly favourable towards the agents, and the issue is still rumbling on.  “It was an interesting time,” says Mark. “We had agents who work in competition with each other and they were all having to speak to one another.

“I guess the key thing that came out of it, in my opinion, is that there’s often very little collaboration across professional rugby, and we need to try and work together as much as possible to find the best solution for all parties. 

“You know, it’s not as if you’re haggling to buy a watch from a street vendor in Bangkok. It’s a long negotiation for all parties with multiple variables involved, that covers the next one, two, three or four years.

“Ultimately, you want to build a better relationship with the club while continuing to work fervently for your client. However, over the past six to twelve months a number of clubs have been consistently trying to disempower the player/agent relationship. This is shortsighted.”

Doing a better job for players was an important factor behind Ben
Woods becoming an agent. He had the best part of a decade at the top of the sport, as a flanker for Newcastle and Leicester, and was part of the Tigers team that won back-to-back Premiership finals in 2009 and 2010.

A wrist injury sustained in 2011 brought his playing days to an early end, when he was 29 years old. It was the experiences that bookended his career that made him think he could be a good agent, or certainly better than the ones who had represented him. 

Shortly after Ben broke through at Newcastle he broke his leg, which would mean he was sidelined for eighteen months. His agent, however, seemed blissfully unaware of what had happened to his client. 

“Then having to retire earlier than planned, I didn’t think there was the support available to players to help them transition from rugby into another walk of life,” he says. “So, I thought that might be an area where I could make a difference and could help, whether that was as an agent or otherwise. 

“I had started doing a law degree when I broke into the Newcastle team. I put that on hold and went back to it when I finished playing. I found that a lot of players were asking for my advice on legal matters.

“I was fortunate because the first players I represented were well established. I knew Phil Dowson and Rob Vickers from when I played for Leicester. They had placed their trust in me at very important times in their careers. They were both 29, 30, so a similar age to myself and they would have gone into a contract negotiation thinking this could be their last major deal. 

“So, yeah, no pressure…

“I’d like to think I can bring some empathy when somebody is injured, or can help manage some of the stress that comes around the period when a contract is up for discussion. I think it’s difficult to go through that with a player if you’ve never been in that situation yourself.

“We’re no longer in an era where clubs will just keep a player for the entirety of their career. There are loads of high profile examples of that. A player can be kept waiting until April and then discovers there’s no new contract. Suddenly you’ve got a few weeks to find a new club.

“During lockdown, players didn’t know when they would play again, they were training on their own, worrying whether they would come back in the same shape, some had contracts that were entering their last year; and something that hopefully we’re a lot of more aware of now is mental wellbeing.”

But there’s also what happens after rugby. The pages of past issues of  Rugby Journal are full of stories of people who struggled to adjust to life beyond the game.  “It’s not just the player’s life which is structured around matches and training but also their families’ lives as well,” says Ben.

“But players are good at taking critical feedback. They can take that into other industries. For an agent, it’s about trying to open their eyes, introduce them to the right people, and give them some awareness about what you can do with the rest of your life because rugby doesn’t last forever.”

When Ben announced his retirement from the game he did it on social media, which has now become such an important part of both a player’s and an agent’s life. “At the elite end there has always been a lot of pressure, that’s what you’re there for. But there’s so much more off-field exposure to manage now. It was hardly a factor when I retired and it has ballooned over the past four years or so.

“It used to be that the only feedback you got outside of the club, family or friends, was a player rating in the newspaper the day after a match. 

“But now you’re exposed to a whole new set of critics.

“So you have to work with players and make them understand there’s a time to do social media and sometimes you need to leave it alone.”

But for those players who want to have a presence online, agents have to work on a strategy to get them more followers and exposure, which, in turn, can lead to more commercial deals.

Another major change from Adam’s era to the present day is that when an agent goes in to bat for their client, they are now equipped with reams of data to support an argument as to why their man is worth a certain amount to a club. “When I started in the early noughties, you would go in and say this person is on x, that one is on y, and this one is keeping that one out of the team, to maximise the financial package for your client,” says Mark.

“Now, you’re looking at everything from alignments of a player’s age group, his peers in his club, his peers across the league, Opta performance stats, the positional trends as well as using our global network to source alternative options. The most in-demand positions this season have been a goalkicking number ten, big second rowers, which have become a rarity, tight head props and big ball-carrying back rowers.”

Looking towards the near future, agents are assessing the
commercial potential of the women’s game. Ben’s roster of clients include internationals such as Adam Radwan and Scott Steele but also Red Roses star Jess Breach.

“In terms of commercial opportunities, the women’s game is growing year on year and I think it will continue to do so. I can only speak from my own experience, but I think there are big growth opportunities for the women’s game. The attendances at the recent Six Nations matches at Welford Road and Kingsholm show that,” says Ben.

It’s all a far cry from thrashing out multiple contracts in a changing room with a coach/naturist. 

From those beginnings, Adam went on to work around the world for various sporting organisations, including a stint as the CEO of the Singapore Rugby Union before then moving beyond rugby, to develop a global commercial strategy for football giants Inter Milan. 

“Being a player during the amateur era meant you shared a changing room with policemen, doctors, people who were out of work, and from that I found I could talk to anyone from any walk of life, from somebody just about to start their career in rugby to the owner of Inter Milan,” he says.

For anyone who thinks ‘I could do that’, what advice does Mark have for the next generation of agents? “You need to have one hell of a work ethic,” he says. “You need to have a network of contacts across the talent management industry you want to go into, whether that’s sport, music or film. You need to know people in that industry.

“The wife stood by me when, for the first eight years of my working life, I was doing 14 hours a day, working every weekend. I’ve had clients who have gone on to become agents, who would text me and say ‘mate, how on earth did you do this?’ Because it’s just hours on the road, hours on the phone, working for your clients.

“That’s anything from potential commercial deals to making sure that every club who is looking for a player in that position knows every bit of information about that player, to making sure those players are in a good headspace.” 

Mark echoes Ben’s sentiments about the increasing importance and understanding around wellbeing.

“Twenty years ago, not many people spoke about mental health. Nowadays, we can see if they’re struggling, and we can put them in touch with the right people.”

He also concurs with what Adam says, in that agents need “the ability to speak one minute to someone who is a multinational CEO, and then the next minute it’s somebody who wants to be the next Owen Farrell.

“Your full range of communication skills are key and you need to be able to relate to anyone.

“Players are very different beasts to 25 years ago when Adam started, it’s all about helping them maximise their potential on a daily basis which is what the best agents in the business continue to do.” 

“Twenty years ago, not many people spoke about mental health. We can see if they’re struggling, and we can put them in touch with the right people.

“But also you have to constantly think, ‘Am I doing the right thing?’ I ask myself if I will be able to look in the mirror in ten years’ time and say to myself, ‘yeah, that was the right decision and we did it for the right reasons?’”

Story by Ryan Herman

Pictures by Michael Meier

This extract was taken from issue 18 of Rugby.
To order the print journal, click here.