Making Celtic transfer history: The life & times of a football agent

He is also the UK’s longest-serving football agent, having been involved in the business since 1991. He was the second licenced agent in the UK after Bill McMurdo.

Sparkes runs ProStar Management and has in his time represented up to 70 clients at one stage. The who's who includes high-profile clients such as ex-Celts Kieran Tierney, Tommy Burns, John Collins, Malky Mackay, Peter Grant, Phil O'Donnell, Simon Donnelly, Artur Boruc and Maciej Zurawski.

In fact, he once represented an astonishing eight of 11 players in a Celtic starting line-up.

It was Sparkes who brokered the first two Bosman deals in the UK. He also shared a bed with Tommy Burns one night... but more about that later. Suffice to say, Sparkes has lived a life all right.

“As a working-class boy to be able to get into football on a level that allowed me to carry some kind of influence when I could not carry any influence on the pitch… I feel humbled and privileged,” Sparkes told The Celtic Way.

“That has never left me. I have enjoyed my attachment to football. In the latter years, there has been a tremendous amount of grey matter that collects in your brain of all the experiences and all the things that you have done whereby you have grown as an individual and a businessman and you bring that home and store it in a place.

"In the annals of time, my name might crop up a fair bit because of the deals I did – like the first two Bosman ones in the UK for instance. My overriding emotion is that I feel very privileged to have been a football agent for this length of time and at 63 years of age I am still doing it."

Football might well be big business these days and some players and agents can earn multi-millions from deals. However, Sparkes is far from happy with most aspects of the modern game, insisting greed and incompetence have made his job and life far more difficult than it's ever needed to be.

He says he is puzzled as to why football agents never seem to get a sniff of a job when it comes to clubs appointing sporting directors, heads of recruitment or directors of football. He believes that football has its fair share of wingers – and he is not talking about wide players either.

He said: "I'm a former commercial manager and commercial director, and no matter how clever or world-class you can be as a marketeer if the team didn't win last Saturday or the Saturday before that then you are not selling as many hospitality boxes, as much advertising revenue or attracting the television.

“Most importantly of all: you are not attracting the fans. The biggest marketing tool or strategy that any football club or sports organisation has is that they win most weeks. People want to see their team winning and they want to be a part of success.

“I have often wondered why nobody involved in football seems to recognise the wider role that agents could play at clubs. We are entering an era and period of clubs appointing sporting directors, heads of football recruitment and directors of football. My argument is that the most equipped people are those that have been in the industry with a black book full of contacts worldwide who know how clubs, players and governing bodies think – i.e. agents. Surely that collection of experience and information is something that is worth a whole lot.

"There is nothing wrong and it is quite a natural progression that somebody who had a sterling career at 'x' football club and is a favourite son of that club should be given a role within that organisation and I am all for that. The likes of Danny McGrain having a role for life at Celtic for as long as he wants sits well with me. That is how decent football clubs should treat their stalwarts.

John Collins moved to Monaco from Celtic

“At the same time to be giving jobs to former players – whether it is as a coach or in recruitment/sporting director areas – simply because they have donned the strip at one time or another is not a good enough reason for them to be handed that position. People taking up those roles, under those circumstances, are ill-equipped and inexperienced to know how to actually deal with it.

"There is not an element of bitterness about that statement – it is couched in realism. Sometimes it is an easier shout to give a job as head of recruitment, for instance, to somebody who has been a popular guy in the stands even if he is actually hopeless for the position.

“Clubs sometimes make it up as they go along in that regard. Like every other business sector there are many people winging it – and in football there are some real champion wingers.”

As an agent, Sparkes seems to operate under a different moral and ethical code. Football agency should never be some sort of gravy train for unscrupulous members of the profession to step on and off as they see fit.

He said: "Generally, and regrettably, speaking there are more people attached to the agency world who do perceive the job to be some sort of gravy train. They are there to make a few quid at the expense of players, clubs… everyone. They are there as opportunists.

“Nobody will ever be able to call me that as I have been doing this since 1991. I have been around and much of my most significant success in terms of profile and reward came in my early years.

"If you are brought up a certain way and you know the difference between right and wrong then you put your best foot forward in an honest and legal way. I was never one to look for the quick opportunity or quick buck and it was always reflected in the people I worked with. If they wanted that type of representation then it wasn't me.”

One of the more frustrating aspects of the business, according to Sparkes, is the years spent dealing with pushy parents believing their children were destined for the Premier League when the Conference South beckoned.

Sparkes said: "Kids do not know what they need but they have a precious commodity because they can play football. Sometimes it can be their parents who are the villains of the piece as they want to cut corners. There’s a generation of kids regrettably who want all the trappings of success without having finished their apprenticeships. So many of them come up short because they have been spoiled in their own living rooms before they try to operate as a professional footballer.

“They want the rewards, don't get them right away and throw the dummy out the pram. They move on and then parents are moaning about clubs not treating them right without any self-analysis of what they did to contribute to that lack of success.

"All of that stuff annoys me and does allow me to be a cynical, bitter guy from one side of the fence. I have an expression that I used before that if a parent thought their kid was Manchester United but his level was Crewe Alexandra then I would walk away from doing any deal. How are you going to win representing that kid?

“If you then find them a Burnley – which is not Manchester United but it is not Crewe Alexandra – then you have still failed in the parents' eyes because they always had it in their heads that their child would have played for Manchester United. Sometimes it is all the agent’s fault when that doesn't happen.

"I tell people not to go down certain roads, paths and routes because there will be all sorts of difficulties, bumps, obstacles and hurdles that you cannot overcome. I always advise players to stay on the side where the best opportunities exist and not to get too caught up in the noise. If players keep working hard and understand that, with a good work ethic allied to talent, opportunities will come.

“When clubs then do come calling they see that they have surrounded themselves with the right agent, the right financial people and the right people at large who are all giving out a positive message to keep them on the right track and show them the way.

READ MORE: Agents give their inside track on how 'option to buy' deals work amid Jota's Celtic transfer

"This is a cruel business and injuries can kill careers off before they have even started but I always tell players to give themselves every chance to be successful and they can do that by attaching themselves to the right people."

It is little wonder then that those who Sparkes has represented have been intensely loyal to him – some having stayed by his side for decades.

He has been former Celt Peter Grant's agent for 30 years and now represents his sons Peter Jr, who plays for Queen's Park and captained the Spiders to back-to-back promotions, and his namesake Raymond who is currently plying his trade at Clyde.

Sparkes said: "I’ve looked after Peter’s career for nearly 30 years as a player and manager – that’s included 12 different transfers and moves finding him coaching jobs. I’m proud of that and prouder still that I now represent his two boys – it’s very satisfying and special.

"That longevity tells you something: at one point I might have been singing the right song but I have managed to keep the tone in my voice for the many years that have passed since."

No conversation or interview with Sparkes would be complete without touching on the John Collins Bosman deal that took the midfielder from Celtic to AS Monaco for nothing – and royally ticked off then Hoops chief executive Fergus McCann no end in the process.

Ironically the Collins deal was not the first UK transfer post-Bosman. That honour belonged to Paul Kane, who left Aberdeen to sign for Viking Stavanger in Norway. Sparkes was involved in that deal too.

"I was involved in the first two British Bosman moves,” he recalled. “They were both from Scotland and they were both my players. Paul joined Viking from Aberdeen which was the first Bosman and then John left Celtic to go to Monaco. Kane made his move two or three weeks before Collins, it was just that John’s was a much higher-profile deal.

“It upset Fergus McCann because we were taking away the option of earning Celtic some money from the contract and sale – but that wasn’t something I deliberately wanted to do. John wanted to play in France, he told me that from the outset.

“So I was looking at a 60-inch TV screen thinking ‘let’s attack France’. Then John said he wanted to play in the south of France and it became a 40-inch screen. Then he said ‘I quite fancy Monaco’ and I was then staring through a letterbox. Somehow we managed to pull it off though.

"Fergus got so upset and started taking advice from all sorts of legal people. As a working-class boy from Glasgow, I always thought policemen and lawyers were the most trustworthy people you could ever imagine as they were all very intelligent.

“But whoever was advising Fergus at the time was clutching at straws – they were saying Monaco was not part of France [the Bosman ruling at the time was limited to moves within the EU, of which the Principality of Monaco was not a member] and I told them to tell that to the French Football Federation, who had governed the team for their entire history.

"It all got a bit tasty really but, in the end, John got his move to Monaco to play alongside a stunning collection of players like David Trezeguet, Thierry Henry and Emmanuel Petit. I was delighted for him.”

Despite those historic Collins and Kane moves, Sparkes joked that for years he was still a household name in downtown Warsaw more than he ever was in his hometown of Glasgow thanks to two names very familiar to the Celtic family.

He added: “Being a football agent allowed me to travel the world and in respect of the fact that I had certain types of deals on my CV and so people gave me that acknowledgement and recognition. There was a certain gravitas there.

Sparkes with Maciej Zurawski at Parkhead

"Yet for years I was probably better known in Warsaw than I was in Glasgow thanks to the Maciej Zurawski and Artur Boruc deals. I was given a degree of reverence because Zurawski leaving Poland was essentially the highest deal achieved at that time and I was the guy that created it. I was on the TV and radio and in newspapers in Warsaw – but I would have struggled to get two lines in the Cumbernauld News."

Nothing, though, will compare to the time he concluded seven deals in less than 48 hours after brokering Tommy Burns's contract to become the new manager at Reading – a hectic episode that also ended up with the pair sharing a bed.

“We had three days to go before the window shut,” Sparkes said. “Tommy went to watch the first Reading training session then came to me and said ‘we need 10 players, Raymond’.

“We did 10 deals in less than two days – I concluded seven of them. My abiding memory is the Reading secretary at the time. He’d been on the go for two days solid and looked like Doc Brown from Back to the Future. His hair was all over the place, he was frazzled. Me and Tommy both creased our sides laughing. This guy looked like he had been to hell and back because he had done so many deals.

“But it’s no joke. I did seven deals in the space of 36 hours with Tommy and I cannot say for certain but that would be a hard one to beat for any agent involved in football.

“We were in Reading’s ground at 11pm on the night the window closed and it was only then that anyone thought about where we were going to stay. The only place that had a room was a Premier Inn. It was a double bed. It was like a comedy sketch straight out of Morecambe and Wise with me and Tommy in that room.”

Whilst football has given Sparkes some unbelievable highs it also dealt him a wretched and tragic blow with the death of former Celtic and Motherwell midfielder Phil O'Donnell in December 2007 at the tender age of 35 – a man he calls “an absolute peach of an individual”.

Sparkes said: "You can watch individuals and then you come across them and you can think what a perfect fit they would be for Celtic and that was the case with Phil.

“Tommy identified that very quickly. He bought him for £1.75million from Motherwell in another deal that irked Fergus. Tommy promised Motherwell that the transfer fee would be paid in one go, that's what annoyed McCann. He honoured it but I don't think he was best pleased.

“But just to be attached to the O'Donnell family was precious. He had a wonderful family with his lovely wife Eileen and their kids… and his dad. He was as proud as punch when Phil signed for Celtic. I have a great picture of the three of us standing outside Celtic Park. It is a brilliant photo.

“There are a number of people when they pass on in this world there is a degree of exaggeration and embellishment of who the individual was. Nobody could have said anything about Phil O'Donnell's life that was ever embellished. It was as true and honest as it gets and to lose him was a massive tragedy."

Due to his association with several of the Hoops players, Sparkes garnered a reputation as being the ‘agent for Celtic stars’ but that was more by accident than design. He has never hidden his light under a bushel when it comes to who he supports after all.

"Sometimes you can get too close to it and the romance is stripped away and that is something I don't enjoy about being an agent,” he said. “I sometimes wished that I was just a Celtic season ticket holder sitting up in the stands and having a laugh with my pals.

"Tommy always used to dish out advice and they were constant reminders of where your mindset should be. He used to say to me when I was privileged enough to be in his company on a social level ‘don't worry about what you've not got, concentrate and focus your attention on what you do have – your life and your family’. He was right all along.”

As football agents go even Burns would have to agree that the boy Sparkes did good. Now, where's that number for the Cumbernauld News?