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The Biggest Agents in Football

By BloggerPosted on Posted in Transfers

Most football fans don’t like to think about what goes into making the game tick, for entirely understandable reasons. No one wants to see how the sausage is made, so many people like to stick their heads in the sand as far as the money and contract side of the game is concerned.

The reality is, however, that the sport wouldn’t work in the way in which it does if not for the agents that ensure that their players get the best deals possible for them as they move from club to club. The question is, who are the big agents that are in charge of the best players that the sport has ever seen?

Jorge Mendes

Jorge Mendes
Bendoni communication, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

If you want to talk about powerful football agents then Jorge Mendes’ name has to be at the top of any list you draw up. His first-ever deal in football saw him broker the move for Nuno Espírito Santo from Portuguese side Vitória de Guimarães to the Spanish team Deportivo de La Coruña, having met the player in a bar. From there, he began to work with more and more Portuguese players, including the €12 million move of Hugo Viana from Sporting CP to Newcastle United. He became as big as he did by regularly being at football schools and spotting talented players when they were young.

@fcwonderkid “King Of Portugal” 🇵🇹 👑 💼 #JorgeMendes #WorldCup #Cristiano #PT ♬ Originalton – suneysounds ♬

One such player was Cristiano Ronaldo, who went on to become one of the biggest players in the history of the game. In 2004, Mendes took things to another level when he helped Mourinho move from Porto to Chelsea, in spite of the fact that Mourinho already had an agent at the time. In the years that followed, Mendes’ influence grew and grew and before long he had become the biggest and most influential football agent on the planet. Part of the brief success of Wolverhampton Wanderers was thanks to a deal that saw Mendes effectively become the club’s main agent.

Jonathan Barnett

Although ‘Jonathan Barnett’ might sound like Cockney rhyming slang for a terrible haircut, the reality is that it is the name of one of the only people in the world of football that might be able to rival Jorge Mendes in terms of influence in the game. Chairman and founder of CAA Stellar Sports, one of the only reasons he isn’t more powerful than Mendes is the fact that he tends to focus on the wider world of sport in general, with his first-ever client being cricketer Brian Lara. He was also the person who is widely regarded as being the reason that Lennox Lewis became such a successful boxer.

That isn’t to say that he doesn’t have any influence over football, however. Barnett has a client list that has seen names like Gareth Bale, Ruben Loftus-Cheek and Jordan Pickford appear on it over the years, having orchestrated the £86 million move for Bale from Spurs to Real Madrid. He was also the man who arranged the secret meetings between Ashley Cole and Chelsea when Cole was still an Arsenal player, which resulted in Barnett being given a 12-month ban and a £100,000 fine by the Football Association. That he also helped facilitate Jack Grealish’s £100 move to Man City means he’s never been short of a few bob.

Volker Struth

There are numerous names that could appear on this list, but Volker Struth is the one we’ve chosen on account of the fact that he’s one of the most influential people in German football. Born on the tenth of March 1966, he is the head of Sports360 and is the man behind the rise of some of the best-known footballers to have emerged from the country over the years. In fact, if you name a German player, then there is a good chance that Struth represents them, and if he doesn’t, then it will be because he chose not to take them on rather than they decided not to be represented by him.

Names such as Toni Kroos, Mario Götze and Marco Reus have all come under the auspices of Struth during their careers, as have Timo Werner, Fabian Schär and Niklas Süle. Although some of his clients have moved to the Premier League, La Liga and Ligue 1, amongst other divisions, the fact that Struth has positioned himself as the most powerful football agent in Germany means that he’s all but got a big part of the market all to himself. Sports360 is an agency that any German player would love to sign for because they know that Struth and his team will push them to the very top of the sport.

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