Agent Mike Wheeler talks about contracts in NASL and USL and conflicts in player agency in Part 4 of his four-part interview with LE Eisenmenger. Part 1 and Part 2 discuss third-party player ownership in South America and MLS and Part 3 explains FIFA-designated training compensation in player deals.
FIFA-licensed agent Wheeler is an attorney and founder and president of MAE Agency.
LE: Traffic Sports owns NASL Miami FC, recently bought into the Atlanta Silverbacks and may factor in the Carolina Railhawks and Minnesota Stars. Traffic is involved in player development and third-party player ownership in NASL, true?
Wheeler: Yes.
LE: How does that work in NASL and USL considering that MLS doesn’t allow third-party ownership?
Wheeler: Each entity in USL, they can each negotiate their own contracts and that’s a benefit, the advantage they have over MLS. MLS owns all contracts, all the players’ rights are owned by the MLS. They don’t really negotiate in the U.S. with a third-party owner, they actually give up all those rights if there’s any sell-on, but 10% of that sell-on goes back to the player. But with USL, the owners control the money and sign up new contracts how they please, they can negotiate with a third party. They can get a player in Brazil off the radar, they sign him up to their affiliate over in the USL and negotiate with whoever brought that player there. They’re paying the person that draws the player there money up-front and sell-on, a percentage of the kid’s selling rights.
LE: Was third-party ownership a factor in the rift between USL and NASL?
Wheeler: Yeah, that was one of the divisions, but I don’t know if third-party was the overall issue. There were a lot of control issues. I believe the NASL guys wanted more autonomy to market their own individual teams, and what goes along with that is also the rights and economics that they put in to generate revenue.
LE: When I caught up with you for this interview, you had just returned from South America.
Wheeler: I was doing business in Columbia and Ecuador with people in the Federation at Ecuador and friends who are coaches in Colombia. The challenge is trying to match up timeframes as to when talented players are free down in South America and trying to get them a secure offer over in Europe. The market over there is just heating up, the transfer market doesn’t officially start till January 1. You try to match up the player’s availability when they’re a free agent and try to get them an offer in full so they can have a little bit of security, so they don’t pass over a good offer in their home country waiting for something to come through the door in Europe. A lot of phone calls back and forth.
LE: You tweeted an interesting comment about your work when you were down there. "Love it when you have a deal and of course a third party jumps out of the woodwork bc player is not upfront from beginning...always happens!"
Wheeler: A lot of these players are attached to agents or runners to get them a deal in a geographical location where that runner or agent is from. So I’d been working with a player and had offers for him in Europe and contacts for him in Mexico. My contact in Mexico was looking for a second team in Mexico and wanted to know if I had someone. I mentioned this player I was working with and we got to the point where we negotiated the deal with the club in Mexico and the contract was approved, the salary, and then the player tells me at the last minute that he’d given the mandate to someone else in October and the mandate ran through January. So that’s when the conflict popped up.
LE: What is this mandate?
Wheeler: A lot of these players in South America don’t want to be signed to one agent. They’re at a point in their career where they want freedom and mobility and the ability to negotiate for themselves because they’ve have been pretty much lied to by everyone under the sun. So what they do is sign mandates for geographic regions. That means they sign mandates or authorizations for x person to represent them in North America for one month, depending on the transfer period, or three months, June through September.
I had a mandate for the player over in Europe and I should have run it by if there was any conflict if I got them a deal in Mexico. But also, the player wasn’t forthcoming because when I told him that the team in Mexico wanted to sign him he should have right then and there told me he gave a mandate to someone else. But he didn’t, and I trusted this player because he was recommended to me by his former coach in Colombia. So then we went through the whole rigamarole to where the president of the team was going to sign the contract and present it to the player. It was a big problem, a big complication and it turned out that the guy who had the mandate then tried to close the deal and at this point the team in Mexico was just, ‘We don’t want to deal with you.’ It had to be done this way, not that way, so no deal for the player. Unfortunate player, he missed out on a great opportunity.
The problem is in Mexico it’s really tough to get into the door with teams over there. There are only eight FIFA agents in all of Mexico. The reason why is all the presidents of clubs in Mexico, they don’t want to work with agents, they just work with their trusted circle of advisors and friends. To get a deal like that, what this kid had, it’ll be tough for him to ever get that deal again in Mexico.
LE: So what was his incentive not to tell you that he already gave a mandate?
Wheeler: His incentive, I guess, was that he wanted to see what the deal was and what he could get. So when he realized what the actual deal was and coming to fruition, that’s when he realized that he had to come clean and give the whole story. The problem is, his guy over there thought he could do the deal himself and he couldn’t, he had to go through a second gate-keeper, you’ve got to do it a certain way, certainly with teams in Mexico. So his deal fell through.
LE: How many languages do you speak?
Wheeler: I speak three - French, Spanish, and can get by with Portuguese. Certainly if you’re an agent that’s going to go into other markets and you’re going to be dealing with third-party contract negotiations and really rolling up your sleeves and getting your elbows dirty you certainly have to speak the language within that country. Lawyers can’t assume the way things are done in Mexico is how things are done in Colombia, Ecuador, Caribbean and you have to be able to speak the language.
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