The Archive

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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Latvia may be the least expected qualifiers for any major tournament, but Daunis Auers believes they travel with a realistic aim: to overcome indifference to football at home

In November, Latvia, a tiny nation of 2.4 million wedged at the northern end of the Baltic, trampled all over World Cup semi-finalists Turkey, home and away, to win a lucrative place (worth eight mil­lion Swiss francs, apparently, £3.6m or 3.4m Latvian lati) at Euro 2004. This is all too much for the small band of long-suffering Latvian football fans, accustomed to years of tediously predictable underachievement. Success has usually been measured by the odd victory over neighbours Estonia. Just a few years ago there were a half-dozen Latvians plying their trade on the substitute benches and reserve teams of English professional football. Now only Marians Pahars (in the cosy South­ampton treatment room) and Andrejs Stolcers (Ful­ham reserves) remain. Yet Latvia have suddenly started playing well, winning and attracting sell-out crowds.

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Dear WSC
I enjoyed Roger Titford’s nostalgic piece about half-time scoreboards (WSC 202). Many people will remember Hud­ders­field Town’s big scorebox at the old Leeds Road ground. It was manned from within and, although it couldn’t boast Fulham-style coloured lights, it was still a complicated business to fathom its information. Scores were displayed in three groups (A, B & C) of eight and unless you watched it constantly, you couldn’t be sure whether the scores shown were from Group A or Group B. I missed many a goal and other dramatic incidents early in second halves through over-attentiveness to my programme to see how (for example) Ply­mouth and Blackburn were getting on. It was usually 0-0.
Stuart Barker, Carlisle

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Footballers’ autographs are big business these days. Al Needham went to an exhibition at the NEC to snub Jimmy Greaves and see what an old Tony Woodcock would be worth

The first autograph I ever got was a signed photo of Tony Woodcock kneeling behind the League Cup, in exchange for my Dad moving house for him. I would dig it out now, but I chucked it away when he was transferred to Cologne. I filled up assorted notebooks with autographs purloined at the Nottingham Forest training ground and outside dressing rooms after matches. Brian Clough always wrote “Be good” after his name, Martin O’Neill always had a face like a smacked arse when he did his and John Robertson always said: “Jesus, not you again.”

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