Three weeks on from the Virgil van Dijk tapping-up scandal and the predictable news has emerged that Liverpool are expected to escape any punishment from the Premier League. Southampton had kicked up a storm by complaining about an alleged illegal approach and Liverpool were forced into making an embarrassing apology for overstepping the mark, yet the dust soon settled on a row that was never likely to go anywhere.
The reality is that at the time the tapping-up story broke, on the back of newspaper stories about Van Dijk being won over by Liverpool’s manager Jürgen Klopp, the majority of people working in the game will have wondered what all the fuss was about. “So what?” pretty much summed up the football world’s response to reports that Liverpool had been sounding out Van Dijk without Southampton’s permission.
“I think that’s absolutely true – what’s new?” Peter Coates, the Stoke City chairman, says. “And I’m not against people trying to do something about it. I’m just very cynical about it changing. I just think that’s how it is. And when it happens against us at senior level, I never complain because we know ‘everyone’s at it’ type of thing. You could almost say it’s part of the fabric [of the game].”
Plenty of agents, managers, players and boardroom executives would be nodding in agreement at Coates’s comments. What happened with Van Dijk has gone on for decades in one way or another and to such an extent that senior figures who have worked on the other side of the fence, trying to enforce regulation and deal with disputes, say it would be a conservative estimate to predict that 90% of transfers involve an element of tapping up. The number of complaints, however, is minimal, which tells a story.
“We know it goes on throughout the game and I suppose we turn that Nelsonian eye,” Coates says. “But I am making a distinction with young players and I think we should do – 12-year-old kids, for God’s sake. What are we coming to? With senior players it’s different. I think there’s a big distinction.”
In April Liverpool were found guilty of tapping up a schoolboy who had been registered with Stoke, leading to a £100,000 fine and a two-year ban (the second 12 months is suspended for three years) from signing academy players from English league clubs. The following month Manchester City received the same length suspension and a £300,000 fine on the back of a similar breach of the rules.
Those cases underline how the Premier League is trying to adopt a more stringent approach to tapping up at academy level, where there is arguably a moral obligation to intervene because of the age of the players. Another reason behind that shift could be the longstanding frustration among some Category One clubs that poaching is going on among themselves. “The original concept was that you couldn’t do that,” Coates says, referring to the elite player performance plan introduced five years ago. “They seem to think what’s happened to City and Liverpool is going to curb it.”
At senior level, however, there is little appetite for change. Mike Rigg, the former technical director of Manchester City, spoke about the need for a new code of conduct in the wake of the Van Dijk fiasco, yet Coates believes he would be wasting his time if he tried to get the Premier League’s member clubs to tighten the rules around tapping up. “I’m not sure there would be much traction because there are other things,” he says. “It’s like me wanting to try to do a better job on regulating agents – and I don’t find that easy to get any traction. I wish we could regulate them better. And I don’t think we try hard enough.”
Agents and regulation – or the lack of it – is a major issue in the game, far more so than tapping up. Fifa washed its hands of agents a little more than two years ago, deregulating an industry that it had little interest in policing in the first place. There was no compliance unit within Fifa that actively sought to enforce the rules around agents, creating what one former senior football administrator describes as a regulatory vacuum.
What has followed, though, is an absolute mess – as many predicted it would be – with each national association tasked with supervising a multimillion-pound business in which the number of people trying to get a slice of the cake has gone through the roof. “Lots of bulls in china shops” is how one leading agent describes the current landscape.
The list of Football Association registered intermediaries – which is how agents are now known – was published in full on the FA’s website this month and makes for extraordinary reading. It is 36 pages long, starts with Aaron Akakpo, ends with Zoubaïda Bouzou and includes more than 1,600 names. They are all authorised to act on behalf of players and clubs in English football and it is little wonder that the industry feels out of control.
“It’s a shambles,” says a director of one of the major football agencies in England. “We’ve got the AFA [Association of Football Agents], but self-regulation doesn’t work. There needs to be an independent body that gets hold of the industry and deals with it. If there was a breach of regulation, nobody will take action at the FA unless it’s a contractual thing that they see. But anything that goes on in the background regarding being an agent is not regulated. Nobody is checking on players getting payments or parents getting payments. The only people checking on us are HMRC.”
Inducements paid to parents or footballers, in some cases to break contracts with other representatives, are part of the mechanisms at work in a chaotic industry where agents are sending text messages to clubs with extraordinary demands for teenagers that stretch way beyond salary and bonus packages.
Another recent trend shows a hike in the number of family members seeking to become intermediaries – take a look through that FA list and plenty of surnames will jump out. In some cases the reason for doing so will be entirely legitimate – to protect the interests of someone close to them – but with the others the motivation is money.
It is, in short, easy to see why few people within football were wrapped up in the Van Dijk tapping-up story and instead preoccupied with far more pressing concerns around transfers and agents, especially as the Dutchman is unable to leave Southampton without the club’s consent anyway.
That is not to defend Liverpool’s actions and claim they did nothing wrong. They clearly made a pig’s ear of things. Yet Liverpool’s crime was not to break the tapping-up rule that appears on page 205 of the Premier League handbook, under the heading “Approaches to Players”, and is widely disregarded; it was to be so brazen and ham-fisted about things that they provoked Southampton into waving a red flag.
“Everyone sounds out players one way or another to see if they would have any interest in coming to their football club,” Coates adds. “There’s no point in pursuing something if the player doesn’t want to come. You want to find out: ‘Would he be interested if we were interested?’ You could waste so much time and money otherwise. But it’s how decent you are about how you do things. You’ve got to have some sensitivity.”