Agency injections: Russian clubs have increased spending on intermediaries by 1 billion

Last year, the income of intermediaries within Russian football increased by more than 1 billion rubles. This became known after the traditional publication on the website of the Russian Football Union (RFU) of data on annual transfers to intermediaries from clubs and players. In 2025, payments in the amount of 5.3 billion rubles from the clubs were recorded. At the same time, the players paid about 116 million.

The agency system

Data on payments to intermediaries is published annually by the RFU commission for work with football agents (previously it was called the commission for agency activities and the commission for work with intermediaries). The obligation to disclose the amount of remuneration was prescribed in the regulations in 2015. Since then, the amounts of payments have been released into the public domain every year.

In 2025, the clubs transferred over 5.3 billion rubles to the agents. In 2024, the same figure was just over 4.2 billion. The jump over the past year was almost 22%.

"The growth in income of football agents from Russian clubs is comparable to the growth of the world's leading economies," said Valery Kuchurkin, former chairman of the RFU agency commission, in a conversation with Izvestia. — A particularly sharp jump in the growth of these amounts occurred in 2018, when they exceeded 1 billion rubles. Since then, there has been active growth. The decrease occurred only in 2022 by 5% and in 2024 by 1%.

Otherwise, he notes, the dynamics are only positive. And even according to the most conservative estimates, from 2018 to 2025, clubs spent about 27 billion rubles on agents.

Vladimir Kuzmichev, former director of the Moscow Lokomotiv Academy, and now a representative of Vadim Spinev and Pavel Banatin's agents (their most high—profile clients are brothers Alexey and Anton Miranchuk, Dmitry Barinov, and Danil Glebov), believes that such payment dynamics in recent years have been associated with difficulties in transferring money for transfers of foreign football players to Russia.

"Many foreign players who want to join a Russian club periodically have to use a self—payment mechanism (payment to the club for termination of the contract), compensation for which may be included in the amount of agency payments," Kuzmichev told Izvestia. — In general, I would note here that the majority of such expenses by our clubs are tied to the foreign market. Approximately 80% of the commission amount goes to foreign football agents.

He clarified that according to the rules of the International Football Federation (FIFA), there are no restrictions on payments to agents from clubs and players. Whereas there are limits in the RFU rules.

In January 2023, FIFA introduced into its regulations a restriction on payments to agents within 5% of the transaction amounts. In December of the same year, she suspended the new regulations worldwide until she filed an appeal with the European Court of Justice, in which she would require strict enforcement from agents. The decision was made by FIFA after a number of countries, including Germany, Italy, Spain, Great Britain and Brazil, refused to comply with the provisions contained in these rules.

In 2024, the removal of such restrictions was also considered in the RFU. Then a number of clubs opposed this initiative. In particular, in an interview with Izvestia, Pavel Pivovarov, General director of Dynamo Moscow, criticized her. As a result, restrictions on payments of agency commissions within Russia have not been lifted.

"We are not writing the RFU regulations on agency activities — we are executing them,— Pivovarov emphasized. — We have made our proposals in this regard at various times, but we are working within the framework set by the RFU. For example, we strongly support the current restrictions on payments to agents — no more than 6% of a football player's income or transfer amount.

Growth dynamics

In 2025, CSKA Moscow paid the most — more than 1.4 billion rubles. In 2024, the RFU recorded payments of about €4,675 million and $680 thousand from the army. At that time, the agent relations commission published total figures in rubles only in the context of the total payments of all Russian RPL and First League clubs, and not individual organizations, as is done now. Nevertheless, if we calculate in rubles for 2024 according to the then average annual exchange rate, then CSKA's payments will be almost 532 million rubles. Thus, over the past year, they have increased by almost 1 billion for the red and blue.

Spartak Moscow, the leader of 2024, remained in second place last year — 1.1 billion (against 1.072 billion a year earlier).

"I'm not shocked by this amount — we are trying to minimize costs," Sergey Nekrasov, CEO of Spartak, who took up this post in October 2025, told Izvestia after making most of the payments. — Of course, a billion rubles is a lot of money. Yes, we are in second place in this table. But if you look into the context, if you look at what, for which players, and how these amounts were paid, then I have no questions. We will continue to try to optimize costs.

Zenit St. Petersburg reduced payments from 874 to 455 million rubles, Krasnodar — from 555.5 to 354 million rubles. Dynamo Moscow has a small increase of 15 million rubles (from 383 million in 2024 to 398 million rubles in 2025).

"We work on roughly the same budgets every year," Pavel Pivovarov, Dynamo's CEO, explained to Izvestia. — The changes compared to 2024 are within the statistical margin of error, if we take the total scale of agent compensation amounts.

At the same time, the Dynamo women's football club was also included in the lists for 2025. Previously, the RFU did not designate payments in women's football. They amounted to 355 thousand rubles for Housing and Communal Services of Dynamo. This in itself aroused public interest, especially against the background of a curiosity, when initially a typo was made in the report on the website and the Housing and Communal Services Company was credited with spending 355 million rubles on agents, approximately at the level of the Dynamo men's club, which caused considerable excitement in the media and the blogosphere.

"The report was published on April 1, so we were just joking about it,— Pivovarov said. — In general, all people make mistakes. Our employees sometimes make mistakes too. So we took it without negativity. It is unlikely that any structure or system is to blame for this. It's clearly about the performer's mistake.

What was more surprising was how, in individual blogs, the authors, without even understanding, began to draw deep conclusions about the published amount.

Unavoidable costs

According to the head of Dynamo, the system of regulation of agency activities in Russian football can be organized differently.

"We have a regulatory system in which agents have the status of subjects of football," Pivovarov explained. — And they are involved in transfer operations in one way or another. All professional Russian football players have their own agents. They are mostly Russian agents. In the regulatory system we are in, they are an integral part of our football. And paying them is an unavoidable cost. Could it have been arranged in a different way? Probably, it is possible.

From a layman's point of view, such a relationship between clubs and agents looks like the outsourcing of club transfer and selection activities to intermediaries. This calls into question the expediency of maintaining sports departments and selection services of clubs.

— The service of agents is that they help to make a deal, — Pivovarov said. — But on the whole you are right. And it's not just about breeding. Agents occupy the niche where the club is underperforming. But since our market is already established and we buy players who, as a rule, have agents, these payments to them are a condition for entering into a deal. The agents set such conditions.

According to Valery Kuchurkin, increased payments to intermediaries are impractical, since their initial function is to help football players find employment and sign more profitable contracts with clubs. At the same time, the players themselves paid about 116 million rubles to agents in 2025, according to the RFU, 56 million rubles less than in 2024.

— I'm not against agents as such, their work and payments from football players should not be discussed, — concluded Kuchurkin. — But payments from the clubs should be canceled. This is especially true in our country, where a significant part of the clubs are funded from state and near-state sources. If we take the amounts that, according to official data alone, have been paid to agents in recent years, then we can calculate how much money could have been used to build stadiums, children's schools, and how much salaries for children's coaches could have been increased.

At the same time, Izvestia's interlocutor did not agree with the view, which is common for the football and near-football environment, that in the absence of payments to agents, teams will not be able to properly strengthen the squad and be competitive in the international arena.

— This myth has long been actively introduced into the mass consciousness by the agency community and interested club managers, — said Kuchurkin. — Allegedly, without these payments, our football will degrade, the results of the clubs will go down. But since 2018, payments have been increasing, and the results of the national team and clubs in the international arena, in my opinion, have not improved in proportion to the growth of agents' income. Rather, on the contrary, there is a decrease in results. And starting in 2022, when we play only domestically, it is necessary to radically resolve the issue of blocking the withdrawal of such a large amount of funds from Russian football and directing them to other purposes.

For the first time, the Commission for work with intermediaries published data on payments to agents for 2015. At that time, the figure in the report was almost 134 million rubles. On May 31, 2015, the then president of the Russian Federation, Nikolai Tolstykh, also announced earlier figures: 2.2 billion rubles in 2012, 1.7 billion in 2013, and 612 million rubles in 2014.