Steve Bone

They like to show, they know that people want to know, so they put out the sort of league table of who spent what on agent fees.

The first thought I always have is I wish I'd become a football agent because they do rather well, don't they?

I don't know how many agents there are, there must be hundreds of them now, you know, the numbers must multiply every year, but they seem to do very well out of these deals.

and i don't you know i don't know enough about what they do to say how on earth can they earn that money or yes they deserve it because you know clearly they're clearly players use agents and need agents and are happy for agents to take cuts of deals you know and clubs nobody is forcing clubs to to sort of pay this much to agents so in a way the clubs must be sort of comfortable with it as well i suppose

I think Chelsea are the top spenders in the top division aren't they on agents which doesn't surprise you with the amount of buying and selling that they do and loaning out and everything else but it's eye watering isn't it and it does need looking at because we're seeing more and more clubs getting into financial problems

not being sustainable, being reliant on owners to put big sums in as loans or equity.

It's an issue at Pompey in terms of fans are starting to look at what our owners are putting in and what form they're putting the money in.

And the money we're spending is a fraction of what a lot of teams are spending.

So if a fair chunk of that is going to agents...

then surely at some point there's got to be a conversation about whether that's right and how to reduce it and how to reverse it a bit.

Yeah, which is fair enough.

They must have a certain expertise in terms of the small print of contracts, mustn't they?

I guess players, generally speaking, most players would not trust themselves to know

when reading a contract, what to look out for.

Unless you know a bit about employment law and everything else, you're not really going to know if there is a bit of small print in that contract that is going to cause you a problem later down the line.

So if agents are experts in that, then yeah, that's a big thing.

That's one good reason why a player would use an agent.

You know, it's the negotiating skills as well that agents must have and must develop over time.

A player that has a good spell in the Premier League, for example.

or championship if you want to use Pompey's division as an example, if other clubs know his contract is coming to an end, he's going to be in demand, isn't he?