Professional soccer clubs around the world have long cursed the existence of agents. They make clubs spend more for a player, pay that player more while under contract, and generally just make things more complicated. Let’s just say if club management around the world could banish all agents to an alternate dimension filled with broke soccer teams, they definitely would.
That’s never going to happen, but we think we may have found the next best thing. Dutch professional footballer Demy de Zeeuw has turned to LinkedIn in order to find a new club.
Now, players going without agent representation is not exactly unheard of, it is just extremely rare. But a player taking to the social media sphere in order to find himself a new professional club as stomping ground? That, our friends, is extraordinary.
We are undoubtedly very far away from a time in which a player the caliber of, say, Ronaldo decides to forego his super-agent and create the world’s most hirable LinkedIn profile, but the ramifications of this in the future are interesting.
Business literate players could give themselves an inside lane to getting a new contract or transfer because clubs, realizing that they wouldn’t have to pay agent fees, would prefer to deal with self-represented players over a player of similar quality represented by an agent.
As unlikely as it may seem, we could look back on the day that de Zeeuw created his LinkedIn page as a landmark moment in the business of professional sports.
De Zeeuw is an innovator, but so was the child that first decided to write his own letter to Santa, addressed to the North Pole. As of right now, society probably holds both of those examples with equal import: none.
The real test of de Zeeuw’s method is, of course, time. Will he get a contract as a result of his LinkedIn posting? Will others follow in his footsteps? Will, 50 years from now, $100 million contracts be regularly initiated by LinkedIn?
We, and clubs around the world, can only hope so.
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