So players need agents.
I think it’s easy sitting here to underestimate the amount of work involved in a transfer. There are tons of papers to do. And there are lots of ways you can structure a player’s payments. You need to come to an agreement on his worth through some combination of guaranteed payments and bonuses. Again, the more sophisticated parties will always do better here (if a team has better modeling, on average it will beat the players in contract structuring). Hence players need sophisticated agents, not gangsters.
Teams need the same capabilities as they negotiate amongst each other, but given that they each do dozens of negotiations annually, these can be internal capabilities, hence there is little need for agents to facilitate team to team negotiations unless they are giving specific - eg translation or modeling. What we are seeing in the industry is different. There are a group of people who are specifically gatekeepers for anything to happen. Even when teams are buying players who are not affiliated with these agents, the gatekeepers get involved, as happened with Pépé last year. These people are simply extracting value from football. They are not adding any qualitative or quantitative value.
