Figures issued by the Football League today show that Leeds are certainly a massive club when it comes to paying fees to agents.

The latest agent’s fees report from the Football League covers the six months from July 1^st. to December 31^st. last year, and includes comparisons with the same period in 2007. The figures shown are the amounts paid to agents by clubs, as the regulations now state that players are responsible for paying their own agents.

In total, Football League clubs have committed £5.7m to agents during the last six months, a decrease on the £7.9m committed during the same period last season, with the number of transactions involving such a payment dropping from 283 to 141.

But Leeds United are certainly doing our best to buck the trend and to keep these traditions alive within the English game. We’re one of the few clubs to have shown an increase over last year’s figure, spending £346,500 during the six months in question, compared to £173,000 during the same period last year. This puts us way ahead of any other club in League One, and accounted for almost half the division’s total spend of £740,160.

We’re not far short of being the top boys for the Football League as a whole, as only three clubs in the Championship managed to beat our figure, and at the other end of the scale there were ten clubs in League One who managed to get by without making any payments to agents at all.

Our figures can partly be explained by the fact we had more transactions than most other clubs (including transfers, updated contracts, cancelled contracts and loans) but it still seems a bit excessive.  It all goes to show how much an advantage we should have over the other clubs in League One, in terms of the transfer fees and wages we can afford to pay.

We can but hope that by the end of the season we’ll have made this advantage count and secured promotion.

You can read the full details of the Football League report here

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