Mes: julio 2019

Paul Stretford, the millionaire agent of Wayne Rooney, became the most high-profile casualty of the Football Association’s crackdown on agents last night when he was banned from working in the industry for 18 months after being found guilty of a series of offences that have left his professional reputation in tatters. Stretford, founder of Proactive Sports Management, was also fined £300,000 after an independent disciplinary commission decided he had committed serious breaches by making false statements and misleading the jury during the 2004 trial of three men accused of blackmailing him for a share of the huge earnings he was raking in from representing Rooney. Seven of the FA’s nine charges were deemed proven but Stretford announced that he would appeal, meaning he is free to continue work for the time being. The former vacuum-cleaner salesman described it as a “travesty” but whether he will be able to salvage his reputation is another matter at the juventus fotballdrakter end of a four-year investigation which has looked at the way he took over representing Rooney, then 16, from the player’s original agent, Peter McIntosh, in 2002, and the circumstances surrounding the collapse of the subsequent blackmail trial against three of McIntosh’s associates. Stretford had told the jury at Warrington crown court that he had not represented Rooney until December 2002, when the player’s contract with McIntosh’s company, Proform Sports Management,...