Kieran Maguire: Man City are bulletproof after ‘livid agents’ hold Uruguay-based talks
Fifa are “making things worse” with their new restrictions on agents – but Man City have the smarts to dodge the fallout.
So says finance guru Kieran Maguire, speaking exclusively to Football Insider about the new reforms set to come into play at the end of the year.
World football’s governing body plans to curb third-party profiteering with a cap on agents’ fees.
Intermediaries will only be able to trouser 10 per cent of any transfers they help to engineer, along with three per cent of the player’s salary.
Fifa revealed on Tuesday (1 February) that they had held talks with elite agent bodies over the new regulations at a summit in Uruguay.
According to the Fa’s official figures, City spent £30.2million on agents’ fees in the 12 months up to February 2021, the last year accounted for.
But Maguire claims that the reigning Premier League champions will escape any significant damage from Fifa’s new proposals.
“Man City are good at doing business and use professionals to help them,” he told Football Insider‘s Adam Williams.
“So I don’t see many challenges there for them as a club in terms of recruitment under these new rules.
“Some of the agents I’ve spoken to are livid with Fifa because they feel they are being sued as scapegoats for some of the things that are wrong in football.
“How many players do you hear of who are unhappy with their agents? I don’t.
“How Fifa will implement and regulate the new rules is open to question.
“It’s likely to create a secondary market in transactions where an agent will also become an adviser.
“There will be alternative means of extracting value from deals even though it won’t necessarily go down as agents fees.
“It is probably going to make things worse. It’s already a bit of a wild west.
“Sometimes if you’re dealing with an industry that operates in over 200 counties, it’s impossible to have a global set of standards.
“It should be a case of managing rather than controlling. But Fifa, as Fifa tend to do, are trying to make themselves the good guys in all of this.”
City are in robust financial health and are the only Premier League team to have posted a profit for the 2020-21 campaign.
They earned an excess of £2.4m on revenues of over £540m.
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