Name: Raymond Wood
Role: UEFA Player Agent, UEFA Ambassador & Coach
Qualifications: 26 Football Coaching Qualifications, including UEFA C, B, and A Licences and UEFA Youth Award Modules. UEFA Player Agent Licence.
What is UEFA?: UEFA stands for the Union of European Football Associations, the largest football federation under FIFA.
So I’ve been involved in football for over 25 years. I was very lucky to be born in a football-mad city in Anfield in Liverpool. I was a coach for around 20 years. I worked in the Premier League for teams like Liverpool, Leicester City, very fortunate to work for Paris Saint-Germain and work for the world famous coach Carlo Ancelotti. I became an ambassador and an agent for UEFA in the last 18 months and I’ve been enjoying that journey ever since.
It was all about opportunities for kids in Australia and in North America. There are two big markets that we work in and I decided that there’s a lot of agents out there who are not doing right by the players and I wanted to make sure we were doing it right.
So I’m very fortunate, I’ve got 26 coaching qualifications, I hold the highest ones in the world under UEFA. So I’ve done UEFA C, B and A licences and that enabled me then to have that opportunity to work more closely with UEFA.
They are super important, there’s different federations around the world that do the coaching courses but UEFA is renowned for being the best sort of course educator so it takes you around 10 years to earn all of your coaching badges in Europe, where in Australia you could potentially do all of them in two years so it just shows you the difference and it’s not a go at Australia, it just shows you the level that we go at in Europe and for me I’m proud to admit I actually failed my courses three times so it took me a long time to complete them.
It’s a lot of things like, especially in Europe, you teach things like child protection, different development areas and also one of the big things we learnt is the maturation period players go through. So when they go through changes, puberty, it’s really important you understand what that seven year old or 17 year old’s going through and I think you’d be silly not to go through these courses if you want to be a top coach.
I think it was 50 -50. So we’d spend a lot of time on the pitch coaching but then a lot of it was in the classroom and we literally, on the coaching courses you’d split your day into two halves. One would be classroom and education based, one would be football and they discovered in England that offering education side-by-side with time on the pitch just gave you the nucleus for success.
I would go and choose maybe a country in Europe, whether it’s England, Spain, France, one of them and just inquire to one of the local football associations. You can do their base level entry course and also from that, you know, you get a bit of travel, you get a bit of new culture and you get to see the way they do it in Europe as well.
So again, you know, some of the coaching courses and badges, you know, arguably are not as good as the ones in Europe, but it’s definitely a great starting point to go through your process here. So you go to Football Federation Australia or each state that you live in, just go to your local federation and they’ll give you the information for the courses.
A successful player agent for me is someone who’s either played the game at the highest level or has actually coached at the highest level because I think that gives you the foundation and the nucleus of where to go from. And then on top of that, I think it’s actually just having an enthusiasm to want to help players.
So being a UA for player agent means actually representing players, looking at things like sponsorship deals, what club are they currently at, how long is the contract, contract negotiations, legalities, image rights, social media rights. It’s a big beast now and there’s a lot of things and I think they’ve realised you become a jack of all trades. So you’ve got to be really good at bringing in consultants into your agency. So I don’t do any of the legal work. We bring our lawyers in to do the contracts and that’s a sign of a good agent.
I loved football when I was a kid growing up and I’m going to work in football my whole life and that’s my dream and vision just to keep helping players and keep helping families.
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