My exit from The Grange in June 1997 wasn’t the usual post-exam triumphant departure. I was 16 years old and was in the summer term of my Lower Sixth year. I had been having some football trials at various clubs during that school year and Blackpool had offered me a position as an apprentice footballer, allowing me to continue my studies one full day a week and at night school.
I remember finishing school on Friday with everyone else and never going back. Football didn’t work out for me as a player but 3 years later I was enrolling at UMIST in Manchester after a short spell on a scholarship at University in Chicago. Fast forward to 2003, a graduate now in Management and IT, most of my fellow students jumped into graduate programmes at various multi-national banks and management consultancies. These careers never really excited me so I jumped on an internship at Warner Music and London Records. It felt exciting, the people were cool, but again it wasn’t for me. The highlights were meeting Holly Valance and helping launch Michael Buble in the UK. What I did for that man in putting promo CDs into envelopes to send to radio companies he will never appreciate!
Football was my real passion and some of my teammates from Blackpool were starting to kick on with their careers. I decided over one particularly long session of Championship Manager with my parents telling me to get a job that I needed to get back into professional football somehow. I tried clubs, boot brands, sports recruitment companies even sports-related sales before I just started out on my own as an agent. I registered with the FA, took a test, got insurance and started my own company. I signed my first client in 2004 working from my parents' spare room, faking it before I made it. By 2005 I closed down my company as I took a junior role at SFX Sports Group, the leading agency in the world at the time and had taken David Beckham to Real Madrid.
In the 15 years since, I simply kept my head down and worked my way up the company through signing better clients, doing bigger deals and increasing revenues for the company. In 2008 we were bought out by LA-based firm, Wasserman, led by Casey Wasserman. Since then we have transformed how we work, opened offices around Europe and really taken player representation in lots of sports, not just football, to new levels. In 2020, Sports Business Journal named Wasserman ‘Best Talent Representation of the Year’. Forbes lists Wasserman as the number two agency in the world behind CAA (my totally bias opinion would point out they do a lot of non-sport related too) with commissions of over $200m a year.
My role varies from client to client. For an England international players you travel with them to tournaments, you are there for commercial work and you make sure you play a very active role in their day to day life simply as the number of decisions they have to make is astonishing. The scrutiny of those decisions is also huge now with social media. Wear an ‘Off-white’ pair of trainers on a team coach when paid by Adidas, and that gets photographed, we have to handle it. That’s before we get into the main part of the job which is recruiting talent, maximising their income through playing and commercial contracts, and retaining that talent as a client of Wasserman.
The thrills of the job are mainly sporting related but can be on a personal level too. If you meet someone of a modest background and help them change their life, or a young player does a big contract and pays off his family home’s mortgage for his parents, they are nice moments. On the pitch though is the real highs and lows, clients scoring goals, winning titles and personal glory. You stop supporting a team and just support the clients. The highs are instant, the lows seem to be a lot longer and challenging. Professional sport is full of anxiety, doubt, opinions, injury and overcoming many obstacles. Clients face these on an almost weekly basis and when you look after up to 40 clients, at any particular time you won't have all your clients on an upward trajectory. Some will be flying, some will be doing ok, and some will be struggling at any particular time.
I never did think where I would end up when I was at the Grange. Probably for the best because I managed to avoid careers that I felt I should do and ended up in something that I wanted to do. My advice for anyone at the Grange now is you don’t have to know what you want to do. Even at GCSE and A Level age you are babies. You literally know nothing about the world and that’s no bad thing, so how can you expect to know what you want to do in the world. If you are lucky enough to go to the Grange, we live a very comfortable life on average and you quickly realise that you are not entitled to that comfortable life unless you work for it. Work hard, love what you do, trust the process and be patient. I always used to try and just do something each day to be a step closer to being a successful agent. 17 odd years later I am still just doing that every day and no one has sussed me out yet!
Tam Byrne
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