Undercover agents

Matt Snow reports in today's Guardian newspaper that the UK tax authorities have now been given permission in the British courts that will enable them to secure access to the offshore accounts of sports agents. At the same time, stories circulating around the football player transfer market over the summer suggest that a small number of unscrupulous agents have been demanding money from players and clubs that they had no right to, and that other rogue traders routinely engaged in railroading rivals in sometimes unethical ways. Consider also that we are little more than a month away from the publication of the European Union's study into the sports agents industry, possibly the first step in moves to introduce guidance, regulations or legislation aimed at prompting a more centralist and interventionist approach to agents across Europe. Is time therefore running out for the agency industry as we know it? Are legal guidelines about to be laid down in Europe that will challenge the whole notion of what an agent is, what they do and how they operate? If the EU's Lisbon Treaty is finally ratified, will regulation become a certainty? In which case, how will the industry be regulated and who will police it? Or will such a development have only a limited impact on the industry, especially as a majority of agents operate according to good governance principles? And as for the unscrupulous agents, are they already operating so much beyond the law that they will continue to operate undetected or in a way that enables the few to continue operating in an unsatisfactory way?