MUNICH, GERMANY - APRIL 12: Honorary President of Bayern Muenchen Uli Hoeness and EX CEO of Bayern Muenchen Karl Heinz Rummenigge during the Bundesliga match between FC Bayern München and Borussia Dortmund at Allianz Arena on April 12, 2025 in Munich, Germany. (Photo by Stefan Matzke - sampics/Getty Images) | Getty ImagesTom AdamsThu, February 26, 2026 at 3:30 AM UTC·2 min readThe European footballing marketplace is a fickle beast. With each transfer window that passes, the more financial boundaries are pushed to the point where it seems like that trend simply cannot continue — and then it does.
Neymar’s move from Barcelona to Paris Saint-Germain back in the summer of 2017 for €222 million seemed absolutely ludicrous at the time, but now, it’s something that doesn’t even seem that outlandish. The more time that passes, the more money there is on offer for clubs, players, their agents, and their representatives — there’s simply no getting around that fact.
AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementFormer Bayern Munich president Uli Hoeneß has recently been critical of the significant influence that player’s agents currently have over players and clubs alike. He feels that the leverage and power agents yield is counterintuitive to how transfer handlings, contract dealings, and player-to-club relations and has been far too destructive.
Former Bayern CEO Karl-Heinz Rummenigge recently echoed the sentiment from Hoeneß, offering his own insight into why he feels the same about agents in the current landscape. “We need reforms because it cannot go on to this extent — the way things are developing financially. It makes no sense to instigate any things and say: We have to abolish the consultants. That’s a nonsense story for me. It cannot be abolished. They are part of this business. We are becoming more and more dependent on consultants – and the influence on players is now enormous,” Rummenigge explained in a recent interview with the World Football Association (via Abendzeitung).
To help find some solutions to the growing problems that keep perpetuating themselves, Rummenigge feels that organizations like FIFA and UEFA need to meet with clubs, leagues, and agents to “sit down at the table and talk to each other openly, honestly, but also correctly.” It’s a difficult subject to navigate through, but with key figures like Rummenigge helping drive the conversation in the right directions, resolutions can certainly be met at some point.
It’s not a black and white issue, rather a gray area where reformations can occur. From the ownership perspectives across Europe clubs are businesses at the end of the day as much as they are sports clubs. Not every country is lucky enough to have the ownership structure that exists in Germany and also works incredibly hard to make sure that type of club member ownership culture is never bastardized in a world where other European footballing giants are being taken over by Middle Eastern business consortiums, trading tycoons, oligarchs, and figures seemingly made of money with bottomless pockets.
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