The Archive

Many object to Sepp Blatter’s plan to cut the number of teams in Europe’s top divisions to 16, but Roger Titford is keen to examine the full horror of what the plan would entail

Last month FIFA president Sepp Blatter had another go at flying one of his favourite kites – reducing all Europe’s top divisions to 16 clubs each. Even Arsenal, usually so protective of how many games their delicate flowers have to play, spoke out against the idea. So universal is the condemnation that few have paused to consider in detail what a 16-club top division would mean. In England (and also Spain) it would mean a lot less top division football – 240 games in total instead of 380; that’s a 37 per cent reduction. As recently as 1994-95 the Premiership offered 462 fixtures. Reducing the number of clubs makes the league competition both much smaller and more occasional – more gaps for international weeks and quite possibly a mid-winter break too.

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While the Czech Pavel Nedved celebrates being named European Footballer of the Year, Ian Farrell  remembers the rapid decline of a previous winner, from slightly further east

Such is the general view of football in eastern Europe today, it takes some effort to imagine teams from there electrifying the sport and win­ning admirers across the world. But in the mid 1980s, Dynamo Kiev, together with the virtually interchangeable USSR side also coached by Valery Lobanovski, took football to another level with a conception of the game as a living machine. Total Football meets applied mathematics. This lent itself easily to Cold War stereotyping – collectivised football played by faceless automata – but the play was a world away from the drabness of the Eastern Bloc, thanks mainly to Oleg Blokhin, Alexander Zavarov and, foremost among them, Igor Belanov.

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Football agents enjoy little in the way of popularity and much in the way of blame. But Athole Still, a man who can claim to be responsible for the appointment of one of his clients as the current England coach, believes his profession is a must in modern football and wants to clean up its image

Do footballers need agents?
Frankly, football is now part of the entertainment business. In the entertainment business worldwide, agents have been established for 150 years or so. So I would say everyone in football who has a desire to have a long-term career must have an agent and it must be one who is fully involved in football, who knows what’s going on. Some use a lawyer instead. A lawyer may do the contracts side perfectly well, but there is infinitely more to being a good agent than doing contracts. It’s much more important now in relation to things like the Bosman rule. At the start of this season, for instance, there were something like 530 players out of work: it’s now a bit of a dogfight, unless you’re a star. But less than five per cent of footballers are what you could call real stars. The vast majority of players need somebody with their ear to the ground who knows what’s going on.

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Though far from ever-present, agents have been around longer than you might think. John Harding  charts their changing role back to the days when they built whole teams

The term “football agent” first entered the language in the 1890s, as the professional game began to expand. The main purpose of the agent was to place players with clubs. For a time, they did good business: in 1893, Middlesbrough Ironopolis had its playing strength built up from scratch in about three days by one unnamed agent. But clubs soon became suspicious of the ties developing between players and “outsiders”. Control was all-important and, once the maximum wage was instituted in 1900, along with the contractual straitjacket called the retain-and-transfer system, agents faded away. The scout was soon providing clubs with as many players as they needed for a fraction of the cost.

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The number of Australian players in Britain has turned from trickle to flood, fuelled by an army of agents. Neil Forsyth  traces this all back to a very English wheeler-dealer

Ten years ago it was Scandinavians. Every United Kingdom team, it seemed, had one. Cheap, professional and highly adaptable to the British playing style (apart from Tomas Brolin, on all three counts) they stream­ed across the North Sea. It wasn’t a coincidental occurrence, a sudden outbreak of itchy feet. Rather, it was down to the emergence in those countries of an ambitious and inventive breed of a relatively new football phenomenon, the modern agent. Well educated, fluent in English and with a largely untapped resource to market, the fledgling Scandinavian agents found the UK a fertile mar­ket. One, Rune Hauge, brought a novel bus­iness approach to his dealings with then Arsenal manager George Graham, leading to the Scotsman’s sacking.

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