IP & Art

A sports agent refers to a person who deals with compensation negotiations and advertisement appearances on behalf of the player who is the player. 

However, it is expanded to currently include athletes' training programs, medical benefits, and legal services, and is expanding its scope to include athletes' property management, exchanges with fans, housing arrangement, and retirement planning for athletes. 

In a typical agent contract, the main issues can be divided into the scope of service, contract period, agent fee, and fiduciary duty, etc. The services provided by the agent include the agency for annual salary contracts, development of ancillary income sources such as sponsor contracts with advertisers, schedule and image management and public relations, management of various social activities, insurance, investment advice and property management, legal advice, tax agency, retirement planning, etc. 

The agent contract period should be set short to protect players. Therefore, it is usually one year and can be renewed. The fee is usually set at a fixed rate, that is, 3 to 10% of the contract amount to be negotiated. And it is necessary to properly manage the duty of fidelity clause that considers the rights and interests of players first. 

Finally, it is necessary to add alternative dispute resolution procedures such as mediation or arbitration for efficient and economical dispute resolution.

In order to foster the golf industry and protect the rights and interests of players in the future, legalization such as enactment, etc. of sports agents is essential. 

In fact, it is necessary to institutionalize active agents and manage them appropriately. In other words, sports agents should be institutionalized in a way of a qualification system or registration system, and insurance should be made compulsory so that damages can be properly compensated. 

It is hoped that competent agents will discover many promising players and that an infrastructure for social indirect support will be built as soon as possible so that they will be able to have global competitiveness.