Wayne Rooney is a case in point. His agent, Paul Stretford, to use Sir Alex Ferguson's description, is "not the most popular man" at Old Trafford.
Yet Rooney sometimes appears to be in thrall of him. "It's like dad and son," as someone closely involved put it a few days ago. "It's nothing like the usual player and agent relationship." And Stretford, for the most part, is clearly used to getting his own way.
He is not someone I know well but I have been flicking through Stan Collymore's autobiography over the past few days and it offers his own insight into what it is like being a Stretford client. Published in 2004, shortly after Rooney moved to United, it also has some advice for the teenager. "I hope Rooney knows what kind of animal Stretford is," he writes. "I hope he doesn't fall for all the emotional shit."
Collymore remembers Stretford going from being "a thorough, professional, understated guy to this horrible parody of an agent", wearing a long Gucci coat and sunglasses and christened, behind his back, as "Toad" by the player's mates, because he reminded them of the character from The Wind in the Willows. That may sound fairly inconsequential. Yet Collymore also came to think of himself as "a doormat" as far as Stretford was concerned and, explaining why he eventually severed all ties, depicts him as a deeply manipulative character. "I had always done whatever he said. I said yes to all sorts of things, often without looking at them. I allowed the line between him being my surrogate father and my agent to become blurred. And he played on that big-time. He abused it. My relationship with him was unhealthily dependent and he milked it for all it was worth."
One time, shortly after Collymore had moved from Liverpool to Aston Villa, he says he took a telephone call from Stretford begging for money. "His business was expanding and he had calculated I owed him £80,000." Collymore says he ran some checks and worked out he did not owe a penny. "A couple of days later Stretford rang again. This time he was near enough in tears. He said: 'You do love me, don't you Stan?'" Collymore wrote a cheque because "that was the kind of hold he had over me".
This time, however, Stretford is not going to get what he and his client want. United, as the Guardian revealed last week, are not going to let Rooney join Chelsea, no matter how many roubles Roman Abramovich chucks at it or what the player and his agent cook up next.
Hopefully Liverpool will stick to what they say regarding Luis Suárez and, between them, the two clubs can show that sometimes it does not matter how much a player stamps his feet. It is not going to change the culture but it would be a break from the norm and that is not a bad thing at all.
Bale is a slightly different situation because of the sheer amount of money involved and the fact Spurs would not be selling to a direct rival. On that basis, it is going to be extremely hard for Daniel Levy to turn down a world-record transfer (a friend of mine, with connections to the Bernabéu, reports back that Madrid have already pre‑ordered 50,000 shirts with Bale's name emblazoned across the back). Yet the Spurs chairman, just like his counterparts at Old Trafford and Anfield, is entitled to be aggrieved given the way the player and his Mr Fixit have gone about it and it is not totally out of the question Bale, Suárez and Rooney will all discover that player-power isn't this season's fashion.
