Football Food For Thought / Dan Fitch / 24 November 2009 /

After Manchester United's Gary Neville moaned about players who let their agents do everything for them, Dan 'The Betting Man' Fitch got out his contacts book to give you the inside story.

This week Gary Neville has hit out at players who rely on their agents to essentially run their lives.

Neville complained about agents who take up to 15% of a players wages during their career, in exchange for handling mundane tasks like buying fridges.

At betting.betfair we like to hear both sides of the story, so we commissioned a top football agent to record his diary for a week. For reasons of client confidentiality, both the identities of the agent and his various clients must remain anonymous.

Monday

Get a call from a 16 year old I've just signed up. Well you've got to grab them when they're young. Just call me Fagin!

He's recently signed a big contract and wants me to set up a new bank account for him. I asked if he really wanted to be bothered with letters from banks all the time?

Why not get the club to pay the wages directly to me and I could take off my percentage, invest some for him and then give him the rest in cash?

He agrees that this is a good idea. I love working with enthusiastic young talent. Particularly when they've just failed their GCSE maths.

Tuesday

One of my lads is moving into a new house and wants it kitted out. New gadgets, new kitchen... the lot.

Gave the Argos catalogue to my wife and let her get on with it. She loves spending money and better that it's theirs than mine!

Wednesday

It's a big match for one of my clients, who is one of the greatest players in the world. Can't say who he is for obvious reasons, but let's just say that he's pretty handy.

He tells me to put all the money I have on his country to win the World Cup, as he's got something up his sleeve for the game.

Thursday

Lay off France to win the World Cup at a price of [18.5]. Nice Little profit. Thanks mate!

Friday

Friday is my favourite day of the week, because it's payday. For some reason, whereas the rest of the population's salaries are expressed on a 'per annum' basis and paid monthly, footballers' salaries are always paid weekly.

This may seem silly, but if they got paid monthly, they'd only spend it within a week on cars, women and drink. It's for their own good.

Saturday

One of my boys has a very demanding missus, who's a big name in TV.

He rings me up tonight with a strange request. He wants me to place 10,000 phone votes for Lloyd Daniels on the X-Factor. There goes my Saturday night, but 15% of 100k a week will soon pay for the phone bill.

Sunday

In this job you hear all the behind the scenes information that the public and even the media, never get to find out about.

For instance, last night a client of mine who plays for a North West side, was staying in a London hotel before their match on Sunday.

Turns out that the manager of their opposition has got connections in the used car industry and paid for some of his mates to spend the entire night revving their engines and honking their horns outside the hotel, to keep the team awake all night.

As you can imagine the players were dog-tired the next day and got absolutely thrashed. Bad news for my client, but because of the information he passed onto me, I had a nice little result on the scorecast. Crouch and 9-1! You can imagine the odds.

Stick the profits on Wigan to go down at [6.6]. It might not seem very loyal, but we've all got to earn a crust.

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