Football has reached the point of no return, with clubs spending more and more each year on the biggest names around. In the second installment of a three-part series on the flourishing transfer market, theScore explains the rise of agents.

Complete series:

Warning: Story contains coarse language

On the outside, agents may seem like the scourge of football, but both players and clubs know fully well they need them to make big things happen.

The fact both Manchester United and Juventus enlisted Mino Raiola to work on their behalf is proof. His involvement in Paul Pogba’s world-record transfer to United last summer netted the rotund Raiola, one of the game’s super agents, an alleged £41 million. That’s more than what Chelsea reportedly paid to sign tireless midfield engine N’Golo Kante from Leicester City.

The conflict of interest is obvious – Juventus would’ve asked Raiola to extract the highest fee, United would’ve sought the best deal possible – but as long as every party agrees to the arrangement, it’s perfectly legal.

The money, largely speaking, doesn’t mean all that much to the biggest clubs. Boosted by ever-growing television revenue, football’s elite can justify paying huge sums of cash to agents just to land the player they covet.

“There’s all this money out there from TV, and the big clubs want the best players. That means they are prepared to spend the money to get these top players. So to get to them, they have to go through agents,” Alex Duff, co-author of “Football’s Secret Trade: How the Player Transfer Market was Infiltrated,” told theScore.

“There’s a culture in football of all the top footballers having an agent. Clubs don’t go directly to players. They don’t use LinkedIn or just call up a head-hunter.”

The power of networking

Because agents have various connections in the industry, clubs see them as a genuine resource. Raiola is rare in that his stable of footballers is relatively small, but other big players on the transfer market, like Jorge Mendes, maintain good relationships with teams across Europe to deliver them their clients.

It’s why Championship side Wolverhampton Wanderers suddenly has a huge Portuguese contingent among its ranks. The big-money move for midfielder Ruben Neves drew curious glances – not because of the club-record fee Wolves agreed to pay, but because he could’ve gone to several other top-flight clubs. The difference? Mendes is his agent, and the former nightclub owner helped facilitate Chinese conglomerate Fosun’s takeover of Wolves last year.

Mendes routed four other Portuguese players to the West Midlands from the likes of Benfica, Rio Ave, and Atletico Madrid – all of them frequent stops on the Mendes tour.

Related – Jorge Mendes FC: How Ronaldo’s agent made Wolves his plaything

Although he is officially listed as an advisor to Wolves, the suggestion is that he has complete autonomy over the club’s transfer policy, treating the team as nothing more than a parking lot for his underused clients. The fact Fosun has a stake in Mendes’ agency, Gestifute, has raised more suspicions.

The problem, according to Duff, is that FIFA cannot stop situations like these from happening. Wolves could simply see Mendes as a means to supply a return to the Premier League.

“How can you prove the motives of the agent?” Duff added.

‘It’s immoral’

Without a regulatory body watching agents’ every move, it’s a lot easier for them to keep on doing business this way. FIFA deregulated the industry in March 2015, leaving the task of certifying agents to countries’ respective football federations, according to German newspaper Der Spiegel. Passing an exam is not required to become an agent, meaning virtually anyone – a parent, friend, or cousin – can become a player’s representative.

It has also opened the business to “intermediaries,” who can act on behalf of a player or club to carry out a transfer. It’s even more difficult to trace where the money is going, and who to. The only thing of interest to actual authorities is the rerouting of money – usually from a player’s image rights – to tax havens.

Because there is no cap on transfer fees, however, there is no way to limit how much an agent can expect to make off signings and even contract renewals. Premier League sides paid a record £174 million between February 2016 and January 2017 to agents and intermediaries, for example. That will only rise. Agents also take a cut of their clients’ yearly salaries, and stand to receive payments for helping clubs negotiate a new contract.

To some, it’s money coming out of the game.

“It might not be illegal but it’s immoral,” ex-FA chairman David Bernstein told The Telegraph.

Citing documents involved in the Football Leaks outbreak, Der Spiegel said Volker Struth, who owns popular agency Sportstotal, is expected to claim €5 million from Real Madrid as a “thank you” for persuading German international Toni Kroos to reject other offers and renew his deal with Los Blancos.

Even 12-time Champions League winner Madrid relies on agents to do the dirty work and keep its stars happy.

‘Everybody is working with everybody’

For other team executives looking to sign a player of Kroos’ calibre, agents flip sides.

The “tapping up” of footballers is a decades-old practice that the Premier League has only recently begun to scrutinise, especially in relation to the movement of minors. To see whether a club has a chance to sign someone, execs often ask agents to gauge a player’s mood.

“Every club lets a player know that they’re interested and anyone who says they don’t is telling lies, it’s absolute rubbish,” former Tottenham and Queens Park Rangers manager Harry Redknapp, who has a reputation in the game as a “wheeler-dealer,” said in 2009. “It’s not a case of tapping a player up, it’s a case of the agent ringing up and asking if you’re interested.”

Agents feed the press with stories – true or false – to give them even more power in the negotiating room. If a player wants out, transfer reports put pressure on the club to sell. The more clubs are linked to a player, the bigger the illusion that he is in demand and deserving of a better contract if he is to stay put. And the more money, the bigger the agent’s cut.

“Journalists have close ties to agents for scoops and stories. Everybody is working with everybody,” veteran Dutch agent Rob Jansen told Vice Sports. “Journalists and agents move carefully around each other to make sure they don’t upset each other. Everybody knows this, and nobody really thinks this is a problem.”

True chameleons, agents can change course in an instant. AC Milan’s sensational signing of Leonardo Bonucci from Juventus reportedly happened only after his agent, Alessandro Lucci, offered the ball-playing centre-back to the Rossoneri. Apparently at odds with Juventus manager Massimiliano Allegri, Bonucci sought a nearby escape. The move, which was completed mere days after news broke, cost Milan a relative cut-rate €42 million.

Lucci has since strengthened his ties with Milan, adding Spanish winger Suso, who is due for a new contract, to his collection of footballers.

‘Go fuck yourself’

Amid all the shape-shifting and menial tasks that come with being an agent, Alex Duff, who spent years co-writing “Football’s Secret Trade,” said the most important role is that of friendship.

Raiola and Mendes have close ties to many of their clients, and met them at young ages. Raiola began working for Pogba when he was 18 years old, Mendes took on a 17-year-old Cristiano Ronaldo, and Jonathan Barnett discovered Gareth Bale at 15.

Raiola has vacationed with Pogba and is listed as Zlatan Ibrahimovic’s “friend” in the Swede’s autobiography, while Mendes is a regular fixture in Ronaldo’s entourage and family gatherings, drinking wine with the Portuguese superstar.

Raiola deliberately keeps his list of clientele short “so as to offer each one a personal service,” the Financial Times’ Simon Kuper wrote in a profile of the Italian-born Dutchman.

Formerly a waiter in his parents’ pizzeria, Raiola has built on a humble beginning, using language his clients, including Ibrahimovic, appreciate. Part of the reason why Ibrahimovic chose Raiola is because one of the first things he told Zlatan was to “go fuck yourself.”

Sensing he and Raiola had come from similar backgrounds – “I had grown up with that attitude,” Ibrahimovic recounted in his book – a relationship was struck.

“So the player trusts the agent implicitly,” Duff said. “They form a bond early on, and it’s difficult to break. The clever ones form alliances with young talent early on, gain their confidence, and usually manage to retain their confidence throughout their career.”

Raiola has stood beside Ibrahimovic the entire way. With his agent’s negotiation skills, the 35-year-old striker is now one of the costliest players in world football at a cumulative €169 million in total transfer fees, according to Transfermarkt.

Despite an ACL tear, Ibrahimovic is still very much in demand. Wherever he goes next, Raiola will be there.

FOXBOROUGH, Mass. — New England Patriots tight end Rob Gronkowski, who is returning from back surgery that cut short his 2016 season after just eight games, told the Boston Herald that he has made a full-fledged commitment to work with Tom Brady’s TB12 Sports Therapy center.

Gronkowski has done so in the past, but the difference this year is his 100 percent commitment level, according to those close to him.

“Just looking at Tom, seeing what he does every day, what he eats, talking to him personally one-on-one, just learning about the body with him, just seeing how flexible he is, how pliable he is, how loose he is all the time, every day and ready to go, I just felt like it was the time in my career where I needed to devote myself at all levels,” Gronkowski told the Herald.

The 28-year-old Gronkowski told the Herald the work at Brady’s Sports Therapy Center, which is located at Patriot Place adjacent to Gillette Stadium, is an addition to his regular work with the team’s strength coaches.

“I definitely feel like a brand new guy just being able to do exercises here … that help stabilize your core … I feel looser. I feel my mobility has increased a lot. I feel way more pliable,” he told the newspaper.

“With the past I’ve had, you worry about [the future]. I wanted to find a way to fix that. I wanted to find a way to make me feel good all the time and not worry. Coming here has definitely put me in that right direction.”

Part of Gronkowski’s work includes nutrition, which is well documented with Brady, who eats avocado ice cream and generally avoids alcohol. Gronkowski joked with the Herald that he isn’t taking things that far, but he might give it a try if Brady gets involved.

“Tom’s my chef,” Gronkowski cracked to the Herald. “I told him I’m only eating them if you have them ready for me. And he said, ‘Deal.'”

Football has reached the point of no return, with clubs spending more and more each year on the biggest names around. In the first instalment of a three-part series on the flourishing transfer market, theScore explains how and why it’s become a multi-billion-pound industry.

Complete series:

• Why do agents have so much power? (Aug. 1)
• How to fix the inflated transfer system (Aug. 2)

When moustachioed striker Alf Common joined Middlesbrough from Sunderland in 1905 for a then-record £1,000 fee, the world was a different place. Capitalism had just taken hold of English industry, television was a distant reality, and footballers had second and third jobs.

The transfer sparked “heated debate” in the House of Commons, according to the book, “When Saturday Comes.” How could a footballer cost so much? And why would Boro, only six years old at the time, spend that kind of money?

The answer was survival. Risking the drop, the Smoggies looked to Common to keep the club in the first division. And he did, scoring a penalty on his debut to secure Boro’s first away win in nearly two years.

(Photo courtesy: The Telegraph)

More than a century later, Common is nothing more than a laughable footnote in the annals of football’s lavish culture of spending. Transfers totalling billions of pounds happen every summer, and the costs continue to soar.

The market, once dictated by local businessmen, exploded once the game went global. As television companies one-upped each other for the chance to show top-tier matches, clubs gained a considerable amount of disposable income. Sponsorships increased revenue, and foreign owners entered the fray with their own fortunes.

The result? An overinflated transfer system in which clubs try to buy success.

And sometimes, it’s the desperation of Middlesbrough’s kind that forces the hand.

The big bang

Clubs’ coffers began to overflow in the 1990s, when TV networks realised they could sell live football as a way to boost subscriptions.

“This made the market more competitive,” Alex Duff, co-author of “Football’s Secret Trade: How the Player Transfer Market was Infiltrated,” told theScore. “Before that, in the UK, there was only one match a week. Maybe not even that, just a highlights show.”

In the early 1980s, TV rights went for around £200,000, according to Duff. Before that, clubs even paid sponsors to wear their merchandise.

Contrast that to the Premier League’s current £8.3-billion TV deal – and sponsorships in the hundreds of millions – and it’s no secret why England’s elite can and will drop bigger chunks of change for coveted players.

That difference in trends dates back to Silvio Berlusconi’s push for pay-per-view in the 1980s. By televising AC Milan’s high-profile friendlies on his network, Mediaset, he created a supply for the demand. Berlusconi also helped give life to the Champions League by encouraging UEFA to expand European competition so networks could televise as many marquee matches as possible.

Oddly enough, there’s now almost a surplus of live football on television. A top team can expect to play 50 fixtures per season – all for a sweet piece of the pie.

Elsewhere, Real Madrid and Barcelona benefited for years from generous bank loans and a disproportionate share of La Liga’s TV money, which funded the famous Galacticos in the early 2000s and the signings of Kaka and Cristiano Ronaldo. Even with new regulations in place to curb their financial monopoly, Madrid and Barcelona have enough revenue to handle hundreds of millions of pounds of debt.

And Paris Saint-Germain has emerged as a serious player on the transfer market thanks to Qatari-backed investments. Should PSG sign Neymar, the entire package, including fees and wages, could reportedly exceed the £300-million mark.

Because of the massive disproportion of money in European football, and the relative weakness of Financial Fair Play regulations, the business of buying and selling players is a high-end pursuit.

Only 10 percent of the 13,500 players who switched clubs in 2014 cost a fee, according to Duff.

The fans want more

But the Premier League has far exceeded its peers. By moving from terrestrial to satellite TV, it turned the upper echelon of the English game into one of the richest sports landscapes in the world.

As a result of the newly negotiated TV deals, the Guardian’s David Conn said the league’s 20 clubs earned a record £3.649 billion in income in 2015-16. Wages represent 61 percent of that total, which is considered sustainable. As long as the cash is coming in, there’s a will to spend.

The biggest difference between the Premier League and its rivals is the circulation of wealth. Even relegated Sunderland, which went a dismal seven straight league matches without scoring a goal, received payments just short of £100 million last season. Only the Black Cats’ level of debt restricted significant activity on the transfer market, proving that mismanagement is still a real problem for smaller clubs.

For England’s leading pack, however, there’s a higher threshold and expectation for big signings.

Faced with shortcomings in goal and defence, Manchester City has splurged nearly £300 million since the 2014-15 season to find a fix. It may now have a stable backline with the pricey acquisitions of Benjamin Mendy and Kyle Walker, but that doesn’t guarantee success.

What it does achieve is supporter satisfaction.

“The big-money signing is a way to materially demonstrate a commitment to the fans,” Stefan Szymanski, professor of sport management at the University of Michigan and co-author of “Soccernomics,” told theScore. “Building a new stand, enhancing the training facilities – while they might actually contribute to a club’s long-term success, they don’t seem as tangible to the fans. Bringing these gift-wrapped players to the fans is part of the whole relationship with the owners and elected presidents.”

The foreign invasion

Now that foreign owners have taken over the sport – which they see as an opportunity to strengthen their international profiles – the rapport between supporters and those owners is more important than ever. And spending has strengthened that bond.

The only reason supporters of Manchester City, Leicester City, and Chelsea have accepted their new lords is down to their clubs’ respective transformations. Each of those outfits left behind mid-table mediocrity or life in the lower rungs of football once billionaire foreigners spent their cash and erased debt.

Chelsea’s ever-present Roman Abramovich can hire and fire managers at a whim without losing supporters’ faith because he’s delivered top players and major trophies. Even a less visible owner like Manchester City’s Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan has had a great effect on the local community, attracting some of the world’s flashiest footballers and one Pep Guardiola.

Spending increasing amounts on newer, shinier things, year after year, has become a means by which to sell season tickets and keep the fans’ trust.

“Buying a big name is a way of saying, ‘Yes, we are a big club.’ It gives supporters the thrill of expectation, a sense that their club is going somewhere, which may be as much fun as actually winning things,” Szmynaski wrote, along with Dutch journalist Simon Kuper, in “Soccernomics.”

The gold rush

While the globalisation of the Premier League, which boasts players from 65 different countries, has certainly boosted its value, it’s also forced traditionally local clubs like Everton to find wealthy investors in search of life among the elite.

By ceding half of his 26 percent share to Monaco-based accountant Farhad Moshiri, longtime Everton board member and Merseyside native Bill Kenwright put the club in the hands of someone who could finance it like cross-town rival Liverpool.

Stabilising finances, as Kenwright did during David Moyes’ frugal tenure, was no longer a concern.

Everton didn’t need to sell Romelu Lukaku to Manchester United to spend around £100 million. Instead, Moshiri’s investments gave the Merseyside outfit the ammunition to recruit Davy Klaassen, Michael Keane, Jordan Pickford, Sandro Ramirez, and Wayne Rooney.

There’s now talk the Toffees could crack the top four.

“You can never take over a club. You become part of it and that’s what I’m hoping – to become part of a club,” Moshiri said in March 2016, after purchasing a 49.9 percent share. “For me, I bought into a new family and that’s what is special for me.

“I give them whatever I have.”

(Photos courtesy: Action Images)

ENGLEWOOD, Colo. — This is the 13th year that Vance Joseph has been to an NFL training camp as a coach, but it’s the first time he has had to answer for anything and everything as a team’s head coach.

In his first season with the Denver Broncos, in a quarterback-crazed city, Joseph finds himself front and center when it comes to answering questions about a quarterback competition he opened earlier this year.

“It’s kind of what you get used to,” wide receiver Demaryius Thomas said. “People are always talking about the quarterback, it seems like. We’ve done heard it all before.”

Joseph has spent, and will continue to spend, a piece of each training-camp day answering the inevitable questions that come with any unmade quarterback decision, the questions about each throw in each drill in each practice.

As much as most everyone wants to score the quarterback derby between Trevor Siemian and Paxton Lynch after each workout, Joseph said Saturday that’s not how it’s going to work.

“They both made plays, and they both didn’t make plays. It’s tough to ride the roller coaster with those guys, who won the day, who didn’t win the day, I’m not going to do that,” Joseph said after Saturday’s practice. “It’s going to be a collective evaluation over the course of weeks.”

“I’ve said it plenty of times: As long as the O-line does our jobs, it doesn’t matter who’s under center,” guard Ron Leary said. “Both of them are good quarterbacks, so we know whoever takes that snap Week 1, as long as we go out there, they’ll look good.”