In September 2023 the family office of François-Henri Pinault, the owner of Gucci, paid a valuation of 7 billion dollars for a majority stake in Creative Artists Agency. He was not buying a fashion house or a Hollywood studio, or not only. He was buying, among other things, the largest football player representation agency on the planet. That cheque explains better than any speech what has happened over twenty years. The agent market stopped being a craft trade and became an asset purchased by luxury capital.
The story usually told, that agents "professionalised", is correct but misdated. The multidisciplinary germ, with lawyers, marketing and finance in-house, already existed around 2000 at firms like the Dutch SEG, the English Beswicks or the American Wasserman. What did not exist was industrialisation. That arrived late, between 2019 and 2025, and it was not brought by agents. It was brought by American institutional money when it discovered that representing Haaland could be valued the way a music catalogue or a production company is valued.
The scale jump is visible in commissions. According to FIFA's annual reports, men's football clubs spent around 237.6 million dollars in agent commissions on international transfers in 2014. A decade later the figure shot up to surpass one billion dollars in a single year, a record that FIFA itself described as the highest total ever recorded. In ten years the spend multiplied several times over. Not because there are five times more signings, but because the business surrounding each signing has become denser, more expensive and more professional.
The origin of all this is dirtier than the current shine suggests. In 2006 the emblematic model was Kia Joorabchian placing Tévez and Mascherano at West Ham with their economic rights held by intermediary companies. The club ended up heavily sanctioned in 2007 and paying a multi-million compensation to a furious Sheffield United. That scheme, third-party ownership, was the frontier of the business at the time. England banned it from 2008-09 and FIFA vetoed it globally at the end of 2014, with effect from 2015. An entire business model died by decree.
Meanwhile power belonged to individuals, not structures. Jorge Mendes set up Gestifute in 1996 and took Cristiano Ronaldo from Manchester United to Real Madrid in 2009, with personal earnings the press estimated in the tens of millions of euros, figures never audited. Mino Raiola operated the same way, on his own terms, and it was said he pocketed an enormous sum for Pogba's return to United in 2016. Names, phone numbers, favours. The business fitted in an address book.
The hinge was regulatory and, with hindsight, it was a planned disaster. The FIFA Congress of 2014 decided to scrap the licensing system because, as its then legal director Marco Villiger acknowledged in Brussels in 2011, only 25-30% of transfers were conducted with licensed agents. The solution was worse. The FIFA Regulations on Working with Intermediaries, in force from 1 April 2015, scrapped the exam, opened the door to anyone and recommended a 3% cap that nobody was obliged to respect. Commissions soared. FIFA itself admitted in 2020, through its Chief Legal Officer Emilio García Silvero, that deregulating in 2015 was a mistake. Rarely does a regulator confess so clearly that it opened the cage.
With the cage open, the serious predators came in. In September 2019 CAA bought the London-based Base Soccer and stepped into European football for the first time. That same year UTA invested in Rich Paul's Klutch, the man who represents LeBron James. Wasserman took over Key Sports in March 2020. And then came the deal that reordered the board. ICM acquired Jonathan Barnett's Stellar in October 2020, an agency with around 130 employees, more than 800 athletes and contracts worth around 3 billion dollars. In 2022 CAA absorbed ICM and CAA Stellar was born. A year later came the Artémis cheque.
Behind each deal appeared private capital seeking returns. Providence Equity entered Wasserman in 2022. EQT took a stake in UTA that same year. Wasserman chained ten acquisitions from early 2023, including Swiss firm IFM in September 2024. UTA and Klutch bought German agency ROOF in June 2024, with around 150 clients across the five major leagues. Football stopped being an agent market and became a portfolio of leveraged agencies.
And yet, with all this concentration at the top, the base remains a swarm. FIFA counted more than ten thousand licensed agents by the end of 2025, and the exam, for the first time entirely online, received thousands of applications. An oligarchy at the top, with CAA Stellar/Base managing according to CIES a portfolio valued at 2.56 billion euros spread across 84 players, ahead of Gestifute with 1.86 billion. And below, thousands of intermediaries fighting for the scraps. The market narrowed where the big money is and widened where the smoke is.
It is worth not confusing magnitudes, because the press does it all the time. The portfolio value published by CIES and Transfermarkt measures what the players are worth on the market, not what the agencies earn. These are different things. The real revenues of these firms are opaque, buried in company registers that almost nobody audits, and that is why any categorical claim about who bills the most operates in the territory of educated guesswork. There is no reliable concentration index for the commissions market. What exists are strong indicators and a reasonable intuition of oligopoly.
The geography of spending has a clear centre. England was by far the biggest payer in 2025, with 375 million dollars in commissions and 51.1% of its incoming signings concluded with a club agent, according to FIFA. Germany followed with 165 million. Europe concentrated around 86.6% of global spending in 2023. And from that year a new buyer appeared with an open wallet, Saudi Arabia, which after taking Cristiano to Al-Nassr in January 2023 staged a record-spending summer that placed it, according to Deloitte, among the largest markets in the world after the Premier League.
The honest counterpoint is that nobody yet knows whether regulation matters. FIFA reactivated licences and a commission cap with the FFAR, approved in December 2022, but a court in Dortmund suspended it provisionally in May 2023, an FA arbitration panel labelled it a buyer's cartel in November of that year, and FIFA itself suspended the conflicting clauses worldwide via Circular 1873 on 30 December 2023. The European courts ultimately upheld that FIFA can regulate agents, but referred the proportionality analysis of the cap to national courts. Translation: guaranteed legal fragmentation. And the 2025 commission record occurred with the cap suspended, which suggests the cap may never have been the driver of anything.
If by 2027 the figure keeps rising without legal restraint, we will know that re-regulation was theatre. If it falls, we will know that the market was self-limiting while the regulators argued. In the meantime, the man who sells Gucci handbags decides who represents the next generation of stars.
