Peterborough United’s Barry Fry lifts the lid on paying agents and insists Posh usually pay the bare minimum

Posh paid over £186,000 to agents, the fifth-highest amount among League One clubs, for the period February 1, 2019 to January 31, 2020.

That’s up around £10,000 on the previous 12 months, but Fry claims the sheer amount of transfers conducted by Posh in the last two years accounts for their high position in the ‘agent fees’ table.

Former Posh boss Steve Evans signed 23 players in his 11-month reign at London Road and 20 of those have already departed with Ivan Toney set to make that number 21 this summer.

The Posh signings covered by the latest costs are Serhat Tasdemir, Mo Eisa, Frankie Kent, Niall Mason, Christy Pym, Mark Beevers. Dan Butler, George Boyd, Nathan Thompson, Jack Taylor and Sam Cartwright.

Eisa cost Posh a club record fee of around £1.3 million when moving from Bristol City last summer, although agents are only entitled to a commision on the value of a player’s contract rather than the transfer fee.

“FIFA rules state agents are entitled to a minimum of 5% of the value of a player’s contract,” Fry said.

“They have no rights to a share of a transfer fee, although many will ask for that and for a greater percentage of the player’s contract.

“Some clubs will oblige agents they deal with regularly, but nine times out of 10 Posh pay the absolute minimum.

“Agents never get a cut of our transfer fees. If we’d given an agent 5% of the £6 million we got for Dwight Gayle from Crystal Palace we would have paid out £300k which was never going to happen.

“Our fees to agents might seem high, but when you consider how many transfers we have been involved in over the last couple of years it’s perhaps more understandable.

“We knew when Steve Evans was appointed we would end up signing lots of players and we backed him.

“And when Darren Ferguson came in we knew we would have to replace a lot of those players as the new manager preferred a different type to Steve. Our owners always back their manager and there are always costs involved.”

Overall, League One clubs splashed out £3.9m in agent fees with Sunderland contributing a third of that figure. The Black Cats, who next season mark their third year at this level and will no longer have parachute payments, paid out a staggering £1,346,373.

That’s more than the outlay of 11 Championship clubs in the same timeframe.

Their figure is also nearly £1m higher than Coventry, the club who had the second largest agents’ bill in League One with £353,632.

Ipswich (£325,262) and Portsmouth (£220,367) are the other clubs to have paid out more than Posh.