What's the connection between Mikhail Gorbachev, Mother Teresa and footballer Diego Maradona? All have worked closely with Jon Smith, a sports agent who specialises in turning one-dimensional soccer stars into all-round entertainer-personalities, and now manages the affairs of more professional footballers worldwide than any other agent.
Smith admits his kind are seen as grubby, dishonest vultures who rip off everyone they deal with, but insists: 'Things have changed a lot since I started in the mid-Eighties, when agents wore trenchcoats and did their business with brown envelopes. Nowadays nobody can behave like that. Players and clubs expect a proper professional service.'
Smith's approach to advising, managing and promoting his clients seems to work. First Artist Corporation, which he runs with his brother Phil, has 175 footballers, managers and media pundits on its books. After last week's agreed takeover of Italian rival Fimo Sport Promotion, run by Vincenzo Morabito, its expanded roster of talent is now 375-strong and boasts many of the biggest names in the domestic game, such as Kevin Phillips (Sunderland), Tore Andre Flo (Rangers) and the mercurial Paul Gascoigne (Everton), plus a host of players in Italy and Spain.
Continued expansion is planned into sports such as rugby, cricket and athletics, which, compared with football, have only scratched the surface of their commercial potential. Under-developed markets - Asia, Australia and eastern Europe - are First Artist's targets rather than a Europe where, if soccer's bubble has not already burst, it is certainly deflating.
'We're now the biggest management agency in Europe, the engine-room of the biggest market in football, which is the biggest sporting industry in the world and also the biggest entertainment industry on God's planet,' Smith says with satisfaction as he sits in his office, a goal-kick away from sad, shut, decaying Wembley Stadium. He speaks like a man whose early career was spent in the record business, who admires the American way of promoting sport and sees it as a branch of the entertainment industry.
The City obviously likes the look of First Artist, too. The company, which floated on Ofex last March, has just raised £5 million to help fund the acquisition of Fimo during a relocation to AIM, where it begins trading on 21 December. While shares in football clubs have fallen sharply, First Artist's have soared. In March they were issued at 33p and had risen to 71.5p by August when, at the firm's request, they were suspended pending the move to AIM. During that time the firm's capitalisation rose from £8.9m to £19.3m.
In floating and then joining forces with a rival, First Artist has helped set a trend among the bigger British sports management groups, which have all recently gone public. 'Everybody said, "You can't float a football agency" but we did, twice this year,' says Smith. 'We wanted acceptability and it's given us a plc mindset.' Which means delivering profits for new shareholders - 'a good cross-section of American institutional investment houses and some good UK venture capital firms' - who have bought into the Smith brothers' strategy.
'Investors were concerned at the time with what was happening to the football market. There was a footballers' strike in prospect, ITV's ratings for The Premiership were poor and people were asking, "Has football's bubble finally burst?" The answer is no,' says Smith defiantly.
'Football is healthier than it has ever been. One billion people in 154 countries worldwide watch the Premier League every weekend. Crucially, football isn't a fashion item. It's not Sol beer, where people got bored drinking foreign lager with a bit of lemon wedged in the neck. It's unique in that it has no challenger as the biggest sport and because, unlike any other industry, its customers are born into it.'
But the positive-talking 49-year-old is enough of a realist to concede there are 'worrying signs' that the boom of the last decade is coming to an end. BBC Director General (and former Manchester United director) Greg Dyke recently warned that soccer's next television deals would be far less lucrative than the existing ones, and that clubs handing players' lucrative long-term contracts could go bust. Club chairmen said a strike would have led them to trim their squads. Huge losses are making Italian and Spanish clubs consider wage caps. 'Up to three' unnamed Premier League outfits could go belly-up at any time, admits Smith.
While defending big wages - 'players are the stars so their salaries are always going to be clubs' biggest outlay' - the agent admits that average players getting more than they are worth has driven up clubs' costs. 'The real problem isn't David Beckham getting £150,000 a week because he's worth that. It's less-talented players saying "I want what he's on".'
Thus Smith is now advising more and more of his clients to accept performance-related deals: basic pay of between £10,000 and £15,000 a week with perhaps another £3,000 on top if they play. Around 10 to 15 per cent of Premier League players already have such deals, and the number is growing fast as clubs try to avoid financial collapse.
'After years of living on Planet Football, spending money they didn't have and expecting tomorrow to take care of tomorrow, clubs now realise they have to change to survive,' says Smith.
More remarkably, so do players. 'That's not a clamp on wages; it's a bonus scheme. There's plenty of money in football for everyone to be able to earn well out of, but it has to be spread better. The "me" culture has to become the "we" culture.' Clients baulking at this will hear Smith warn that unless players help clubs control their costs, drastic pruning of squad sizes could deprive them of a living.
Smith, whose eclectic past includes organising speaking tours of Britain by both Gorbachev and Mother Teresa, helped pioneer the idea of footballers as talk show material. 'We took them out of Shoot and into Cosmo and Harpers, and tried to make them more pizzazzful,' he says. A master at spotting talent, he is now overseeing the transition of several ex-footballers from TV pundits into presenters. For example, he is talking to broadcasters about funding a series on the history of black football fronted by ex-Chelsea manager Ruud Gullit. The potential to sell that worldwide, rather than just in Britain, typifies the globalisation of sport, which Smith is relying on to deliver bigger profits than the healthy £715,000 on a £1.7m turnover the firm posted in the year to June.
The vast potential of the Far East market will be exploited by moving players from Europe to countries such as Japan, China, Malaysia and Indonesia - territories with ample opportunity for striking lucrative sponsorship deals. Likewise, bringing European-style know-how to the commercial affairs of cricketers in India and Pakistan is another challenge. 'I don't want Fred Smith of Lancashire. I want the next Sachin Tendulkar, the kind of players who are the David Beckhams of their own countries and can earn a fortune,' says Smith.
Smith admits his kind are seen as grubby, dishonest vultures who rip off everyone they deal with, but insists: 'Things have changed a lot since I started in the mid-Eighties, when agents wore trenchcoats and did their business with brown envelopes. Nowadays nobody can behave like that. Players and clubs expect a proper professional service.'
Smith's approach to advising, managing and promoting his clients seems to work. First Artist Corporation, which he runs with his brother Phil, has 175 footballers, managers and media pundits on its books. After last week's agreed takeover of Italian rival Fimo Sport Promotion, run by Vincenzo Morabito, its expanded roster of talent is now 375-strong and boasts many of the biggest names in the domestic game, such as Kevin Phillips (Sunderland), Tore Andre Flo (Rangers) and the mercurial Paul Gascoigne (Everton), plus a host of players in Italy and Spain.
Continued expansion is planned into sports such as rugby, cricket and athletics, which, compared with football, have only scratched the surface of their commercial potential. Under-developed markets - Asia, Australia and eastern Europe - are First Artist's targets rather than a Europe where, if soccer's bubble has not already burst, it is certainly deflating.
'We're now the biggest management agency in Europe, the engine-room of the biggest market in football, which is the biggest sporting industry in the world and also the biggest entertainment industry on God's planet,' Smith says with satisfaction as he sits in his office, a goal-kick away from sad, shut, decaying Wembley Stadium. He speaks like a man whose early career was spent in the record business, who admires the American way of promoting sport and sees it as a branch of the entertainment industry.
The City obviously likes the look of First Artist, too. The company, which floated on Ofex last March, has just raised £5 million to help fund the acquisition of Fimo during a relocation to AIM, where it begins trading on 21 December. While shares in football clubs have fallen sharply, First Artist's have soared. In March they were issued at 33p and had risen to 71.5p by August when, at the firm's request, they were suspended pending the move to AIM. During that time the firm's capitalisation rose from £8.9m to £19.3m.
In floating and then joining forces with a rival, First Artist has helped set a trend among the bigger British sports management groups, which have all recently gone public. 'Everybody said, "You can't float a football agency" but we did, twice this year,' says Smith. 'We wanted acceptability and it's given us a plc mindset.' Which means delivering profits for new shareholders - 'a good cross-section of American institutional investment houses and some good UK venture capital firms' - who have bought into the Smith brothers' strategy.
'Investors were concerned at the time with what was happening to the football market. There was a footballers' strike in prospect, ITV's ratings for The Premiership were poor and people were asking, "Has football's bubble finally burst?" The answer is no,' says Smith defiantly.
'Football is healthier than it has ever been. One billion people in 154 countries worldwide watch the Premier League every weekend. Crucially, football isn't a fashion item. It's not Sol beer, where people got bored drinking foreign lager with a bit of lemon wedged in the neck. It's unique in that it has no challenger as the biggest sport and because, unlike any other industry, its customers are born into it.'
But the positive-talking 49-year-old is enough of a realist to concede there are 'worrying signs' that the boom of the last decade is coming to an end. BBC Director General (and former Manchester United director) Greg Dyke recently warned that soccer's next television deals would be far less lucrative than the existing ones, and that clubs handing players' lucrative long-term contracts could go bust. Club chairmen said a strike would have led them to trim their squads. Huge losses are making Italian and Spanish clubs consider wage caps. 'Up to three' unnamed Premier League outfits could go belly-up at any time, admits Smith.
While defending big wages - 'players are the stars so their salaries are always going to be clubs' biggest outlay' - the agent admits that average players getting more than they are worth has driven up clubs' costs. 'The real problem isn't David Beckham getting £150,000 a week because he's worth that. It's less-talented players saying "I want what he's on".'
Thus Smith is now advising more and more of his clients to accept performance-related deals: basic pay of between £10,000 and £15,000 a week with perhaps another £3,000 on top if they play. Around 10 to 15 per cent of Premier League players already have such deals, and the number is growing fast as clubs try to avoid financial collapse.
'After years of living on Planet Football, spending money they didn't have and expecting tomorrow to take care of tomorrow, clubs now realise they have to change to survive,' says Smith.
More remarkably, so do players. 'That's not a clamp on wages; it's a bonus scheme. There's plenty of money in football for everyone to be able to earn well out of, but it has to be spread better. The "me" culture has to become the "we" culture.' Clients baulking at this will hear Smith warn that unless players help clubs control their costs, drastic pruning of squad sizes could deprive them of a living.
Smith, whose eclectic past includes organising speaking tours of Britain by both Gorbachev and Mother Teresa, helped pioneer the idea of footballers as talk show material. 'We took them out of Shoot and into Cosmo and Harpers, and tried to make them more pizzazzful,' he says. A master at spotting talent, he is now overseeing the transition of several ex-footballers from TV pundits into presenters. For example, he is talking to broadcasters about funding a series on the history of black football fronted by ex-Chelsea manager Ruud Gullit. The potential to sell that worldwide, rather than just in Britain, typifies the globalisation of sport, which Smith is relying on to deliver bigger profits than the healthy £715,000 on a £1.7m turnover the firm posted in the year to June.
The vast potential of the Far East market will be exploited by moving players from Europe to countries such as Japan, China, Malaysia and Indonesia - territories with ample opportunity for striking lucrative sponsorship deals. Likewise, bringing European-style know-how to the commercial affairs of cricketers in India and Pakistan is another challenge. 'I don't want Fred Smith of Lancashire. I want the next Sachin Tendulkar, the kind of players who are the David Beckhams of their own countries and can earn a fortune,' says Smith.
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