Who is Sports agent?

A sports agent is a person who procures and negotiates employment and endorsement contracts for a player. In return, they receive between four and ten percent of the playing contract and ten to twenty percent of the endorsement contract although this figure varies based on their own negotiations with the sports figures.

A sports agent is a person who helps market athletes or products associated with that athlete to promote an athlete's career. Agents are responsible for all communications with team owners, managers, coaches and other individuals to help promote an athlete's career. Primarily, agents are used to broker and negotiate contracts for their clients. Also, they are responsible for making recommendations in regards to their options. In addition to finding incoming sources, agents often handle public relations matters for their clients. In some large sports agencies, such as IMG, Creative Artists Agency and Octagon, agents deal with all aspects of a client's finances, from investment to filing taxes.

Sports agents may be relied upon by their clients for guidance in all business aspects of life, and sometimes even more broadly. For example, hockey agents start recruiting clients as young as 15, allowing the agent to guide the athlete's career before the NHL draft, which happens usually at 18 years of age.
Due to the large and complicated contracts, many sports agents are lawyers or have a experience in contractual law. Agents are expected to be knowledgeable about finance, business management, financial and risk analysis, as well as sports. It is important for sports agent to follow the trends in sports. Other skills an agent must possess is excellent communication and negotiation skills. Agents must be highly motivated, willing to work long hours, and have the ability to multitask. It is very common for agents to be in negotiations with several clients at one time.^[1]

Some agents are part of large companies and some are on their own. The number of clients an individual agent can handle and how many his or her employing agency can handle in total are interdependent variables. The signed contract is such that the player will receive the full contract amount and the consultant companies then take their income from the adds directly representing the player.

Before the 1990s, most football players did not use agents. In some cases, they used for instance their father as agents. Due to most parents' naivety about the football business, these young footballers were often given less-than stellar contracts by football clubs, which yielded lower salaries than they thought they deserved.^[2] In Sweden, there were only three licensed agents in 1995.^[3] Today, there are 33. As per FIFA, there are 5187 licensed football agents world-wide with 600 agents in Italy alone.^[4] Since 2001, agents have not been licensed by FIFA. Instead, agents are licensed directly by each association