Blunt remarks: Bayern star Tah takes aim at agents

Jonathan Tah

Bayern Munich’s defensive leader Jonathan Tah has cast a remarkable light on the player agent industry with some notable comments and had hardly a good word to say about it.

"There is so much that happens behind the players' backs that the player does not even notice," Tah began. "You do not ask questions and actually do not want anything to do with it either. In the end, as a player you earn less money because the agent makes a deal with the club and pockets the money himself," he went on in the Tim Gabel Podcast, while also criticising immature players who hand over all responsibility for their own lives to those agents.

Responding to the host's remark that agents partly raise players "like giant babies", Tah said: "You are speaking from my soul. I find it so awful to watch at times, because that giant baby standing there is then in his late 20s or early 30s and all you think is: 'Bro, have you ever really looked at yourself?' It is about money too, but not only that, it is about your entire life," the Germany international said.

He said agents and the people closest to a player are largely responsible for that player's personal development, and having "too many yes-men" only makes it worse. "When you grow up, at some point the moment comes when you grow out of the child's role and take responsibility yourself. You meet a woman, at some point you have to provide for the family yourself. How are you supposed to do that if your parents always keep you small and do not give you the opportunity to develop further at all?" Tah asked as he drew the comparison.

Still, Tah did not want to tar the entire agency business with the same brush ("Not everyone is like that"), "but we have to talk about it because there are still too many who are exactly like that. That cannot be accepted, it cannot go on like that." The 30-year-old said "70 per cent" of the more dubious agents in professional football set his alarm bells ringing: "Not everyone is a completely disgusting person who deliberately screws somebody else over. I am very deliberately talking about those where I have the feeling that the people around them are only yes-men who do not want the player to grow and come into his own."

Now represented by star agent Pini Zahavi and his German associate Maxi Bielefeld, the Germany international said he is very satisfied. "There is always a lot of emotion involved in football, and when it comes to something like this, you have to leave that aside for once. We are talking about business, so we are sitting here like business people and not as footballers. Stop with the shit and let us speak like business people. That is what I like about Pini," he said in praise of his agent.

More broadly, this is how he views player agents: "Earn as much money as you want, but just be straight, honest, decent and a good person. You do not need to say that you do not want to earn money." He finds it "always bad when you are unfair and dishonest towards the people you work with. That is why I think it is bad and good that people are talking about it."