In the week that Charlie Watts passed, some sympathy for the devil.

Plainly, Mino Raiola's demands for taking Erland Haaland to Chelsea were ridiculous.

According to reports in Germany, he wanted a £34million cut, plus an annual retainer worth £2m per year, and the player's wages were coming in at £820,000 per week.

It added up to roughly £275m, without the transfer fee.

Chelsea said no and bought Romelu Lukaku instead.

Ballpark estimates set the cost of his deal at roughly £215m, including Inter Milan's £93m, but without factoring in payment to his agent Federico Pastorello — and he will undoubtedly be rewarded because nothing happens unless the representative gets his share.

Of course, it looks obscen

/>Tens of millions leaking from the game so a player can join a club he desires and that desires him. What do they actually do, these guys? This is where the sympathy comes in.

Here's what they do. They stop transfers ending up like Harry Kane's to Manchester Cit
/>Let's say Raiola had been in the middle there. Might he have found a way of brokering the deal so both sides thought they had won?

A price that was not quite the £150m Tottenham wanted, but certainly more than the £120m City were prepared to pay.

Maybe some City players that were worth having could have sweetened the dea

/>Surely whoever pulled that off would be worth City's spare, even if it amounted to tens of millions. 

It is usually at this point that the chairman of Accrington Stanley, or a club in the lower echelons, compares agents fees with the money it would take to keep Rochdale goin

/>Apples and oranges.

The owner of the local corner shop might as well complain about his struggle to pay rising high street rates in the context of Tesco's marketing budget. The sport is the same but the business models are unrecognisable.

Agents fees will always be a terrible look for football but at the elite level they serve a purpose.

Lacking professional guidance, Kane played his hand poorl

/>Daniel Levy has come out looking like the arch-negotiator, although we'll see about that.

A Tottenham team with Kane in it ended up in the UEFA Conference League. Tottenham teams featuring Kane are yet to win a trophy across 10 seasons.

He's 28, increasingly vulnerable to injury, and has played less than 30 Premier League games in two of his last three seasons.

As brilliant as Kane was in 2020-21, there is an argument that a price existed at which selling to rebuild might appea

/>Just that no one found it, offered it, or was in a position to consider it.

And that's what agents do. They connect the clubs, then they connect the player. Next summer, when Haaland will inevitably move, he is going to have a choice of destination
/>And his agent will advise on the best one. 

That steer is worth money to the successful suitor, particularly if it isn't an obvious fit. The year Raiola turned Paul Pogba towards Old Trafford, Manchester United weren't even a Champions League club.

Equally when Fernando Felicevich persuaded Alexis Sanchez to go there and not to Manchester City, in 2018, he is believed to have received upwards of £10

/>Yet City were the superior destination.

Sanchez knew the manager, Pep Guardiola, and City were a better, more successful club with better prospects, as has been proved.

So, was Felicevich's counsel worth £10m to Unite
/>Of course it was.

Sadly, it was a deal that did not age well but that's not Felicevich's fault. He had a commodity and Manchester United strongly believed in the worth and potential of that commodity. Few suspected how big a disappointment Sanchez would b

/>And Felicevich is not alone.

Manchester City also lost out to United over Fred and Harry Maguire. In each of those deals an agent was guiding the buying clubs on what to bid to win the battle, speaking to the interested parties, keeping bus
/>These guys don't just let events unfold, they make them happen.

True, plenty of players with professional representation have tried and failed to get out of Tottenham under Levy. Yet there was something of the innocent abroad about Kane's negotiation.

From the start, with the hope that what was always going to be a complex transaction could be completed in a matter of weeks prior to the European Championship, the naivety was painful. 

There have always been family representatives, but it was different when Neville Neville went in to discuss his son Gary's next deal at Manchester United.

Gary just wanted to play for Manchester United, and the club wanted him at right bac

/>Neville senior said nothing ever took more than 10 minutes.

Had he been trying to finesse a move to another English club, however — because the suggestion is Levy was always more receptive to selling Kane abroad — that might have needed a harder-nosed presence.

Equally, it can be difficult for clubs to deal with family me


Agents might be more realistic about their clients' potential.

They will know, for instance, that a midfielder who is not a prolific goalscorer is never going to fetch the same money as Raheem Sterling.

A parent might not see

At the 2006 World Cup in Germany, the press and the players' families ended up staying in the same hotel in Baden-Baden.

What quickly became apparent was that the wives and girlfriends didn't really care what was written about the football, as long as the paparazzi shots looked all right on the features pages.

Parents, however, were waiting hatchet-faced in the breakfast room, if junior dropped to six out


Parents won't always hear what you're saying and often don't want to.