AFL player management is not a licence to print money

BACK in the day it was a handful of accountants, financial planners and lawyers who dabbled in player contracts. How times have changed.

Craig Kelly

ON THE eve of football's professional age in the early 1990s, a handful of accountants, financial planners and lawyers dabbled in player contracts — doing the paperwork for those stars lucky enough to share in a club payroll that didn't hit $2 million until '95.

Now, the AFLPA accredits more than 80 agents — roughly one for every 10 AFL-listed players. Competition for talent is fierce and the agent’s reality is far less glamorous than might be imagined.

There are a handful at the top — including Craig Kelly's Elite Sports Properties, Liam Pickering’s Strategic and Paul Connors with Connors Sports Management — who boast the lion’s share of the game’s biggest stars.

A second tier of agencies includes Stride, Velocity and McDonald Sports.

Ricky Nixon — an industry pioneer who started managing players in 1992 — says the likes of Kelly, Connors and Pickering get a free kick from brand recognition and star power.

They can pick up a handful top draft prospects because of who is already on their books.

But even they must have more strings to their bow than simply looking after footballers’ contracts if they want to succeed financially.

For the rest, as one former agent put it: “There are so many agents now — there is no money to be made”.

“People confuse seeing agents in the media with (them) being suddenly rich from it”.

Another said: “If it’s your only job, I don’t know how you are going to survive”.

An agent’s whack from doing a standard contract is usually 4 per cent.

Roughly, the player managers’ collective cut from the near $175 million in total player payments is $7 million.

A Sydney-based sports agent told the Herald Sun he “wouldn’t touch footy with a 10-foot pole” because it lacked the international factor that makes other sports — such as rugby and, in more recent times, cricket — so profitable.

A younger agent trying to make a go of it is typically put on a basic salary and then paid a percentage of the percentage the agency makes from contract signings.

It means a lot of time spent watching junior footy — under-16s and up — and effectively playing a human futures market.

By late September, more than 490 draft hopefuls had supplied the AFLPA with a copy of a standard representative agreement with an agent.

Only a fifth of them will find their way onto an AFL list for next season — and that includes those who will be placed on a rookie list.

Even then, there is no money to be made from the kids in the first couple of years.

Mark Kleiman has seen player agency from all sides — as a football manager at Collingwood, from the inside at Velocity Sports and now as head of football at 3AW.

He says an agent’s hard yards can be dashed in an instant.

“You can be talking to a guy for six months and all of a sudden you get a phone call saying he is going with someone else. But you have to do that work otherwise you will never get anyone,” he said.

Nixon says the AFL was lucky in early days because he, Kelly and others had all come for the game and lived in the footy world.

He reckons with more agents than ever now involved — including many from non-footy backgrounds — has begun to show through in the dealings of some agents.

Ralph Carr — who has come from an entertainment industry background — played a part in Travis Cloke’s torturous negotiations with Collingwood last year and has only this week emerged from a reputation-bruising encounter with Dustin Martin.

In a recent blog, Nixon — who handled Martin’s previous Richmond contract — questioned Carr’s handling of the Martin situation, and he hasn’t been alone.

“How could you take your client to Sydney for a meeting without a written offer on the table?” Nixon said.

More generally, Nixon said inexperience was showing in the player agent ranks.

“It’s OK to sit exams and study rules, but if you don’t know how to negotiate, if you don’t know how the salary cap works, if you don’t have a feel for footy and the personalities and people in the game, you’ve got no hope of being successful,” he said.

Another agent said in the main, relations with clubs are better than they used to be.

Even so, competing forces can cause tension — such as when a TV appearance might be considered club promotion or a money-spinning personal appearance, depending on your vantage point.

Ricky Nixon

SHOW ME THE MONEY!!

SO where is the money?

The media has traditionally been a rich vein — managers can take about 10 per cent of a paid appearance on The Footy Show, for example.

And for those with players at the very top, endorsements and sponsorships can be lucrative — an agent might take up to 20 per cent of the fee for a player plugging chocolate, or a footwear contract.

But Nixon is surprised that no agency has made a real fist of cashing in on new media, and he reckons there is little inventiveness with the way players are used in the traditional outlets.

“I made most of my money from radio and TV shows — when I had (Jason) Dunstall and (Nick) Riewoldt and even back further, (Doug) Hawkins and those sort of people.

“It would either be fees from them appearing on the Footy Show or Channel 7 productions or, I owned my own shows Pig, Jimmy and Rooboy and The Gospel which were on Fox and Triple M.

“I don’t see that happening now. I can’t believe that smart agents haven’t cottoned on to technology, the web and everything else.”

Kelly’s Elite Sports is now international, deals with a range of sports including cricket and spends as much time managing events for a range of corporate and sports industry partners as it does dealing with players. It also has marketing and merchandising branches.

Pickering’s Strategic has a more traditional accounting arm.

One player said he dealt more with the financial planning side of the business than he did with the agency.

He reckoned you could almost live without a manager except at contract time, when it was vital to have a good rep to accurately find your market worth and hammer out a fair deal.

Craig Kelly

AND... WHEN SOMETHING GOES WRONG?

“WHEN you are playing and you’re low on cash, you can just ring up the manager and say, ‘put another $10,000 in my account’.”

Anecdotes abound about players getting to the end of their careers and not knowing how to pay a bill or access their bank accounts.

Some agents take carriage of all their players’ income, and pay out a weekly allowance.

“They basically do everything for them to be honest,” a former agent said.

And a drama being played out at the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal between agent James Pitcher and former Carlton player Luke Mitchell suggests it’s not a thing of the past.

In documents lodged with the tribunal, Mitchell sought almost $22,000 damages arising from a 2012 car accident, based on an allegation Pitcher had not told him his insurance policy had expired.

“You have an obligation in the first two or three years to educate them — not babysit them,” said Nixon.

This year’s Essendon doping saga has seen some management companies go above and beyond normal agent-player relations.

In May, the Herald Sun revealed Kelly’s ESP had produced a 23-page briefing paper for its contingent of Bombers players who were soon to face ASADA interviewers.

It gave detailed instructions on how to answer tough questions as ASADA tried to unravel details about the club’s supplements program in 2012.

Kelly made no apologies for putting his players’ interests first.

“Our position has to be always to the individual who we manage and get paid by,” Kelly said in May. “There may come a time when the interests of the individual are different to that of the club and the players’ association … our job is to look after the individual.”

Kleiman says there are three real keys to being a good player agent: negotiate the best possible deal for your client; take care of the players’ whole financial well-being and be someone the player can trust — someone to lean on.

“You’ve got to be able to give good advice and that is why guys like Craig Kelly and Paul Connors and Liam Pickering are all in the game because they understand,” he said.

“I would be very surprised if the advice they were giving their players wasn’t up to speed.”