In the rarefied world of the so-called super-agent, and certainly the super-rich agent, Jonathan Barnett was an early kingpin.
The 75-year-old Londoner’s love of football and money, his tough negotiating style and his appetite for hard work made him a forerunner to the likes of Jorge Mendes, Pini Zahavi and the late Mino Raiola, who made tens of millions of pounds from transfer deals as the sport was transformed from a rich man’s plaything to the preserve of oil-rich nation states and private equity firms over the past two decades.
Barnett was quick to spot the growing commercial opportunities in football when he set up Stellar Sports with family friend David Manasseh in 1992, fittingly the year the Premier League was created, a move which kickstarted the football boom. His career has largely been a runaway success ever since, to the extent that Forbes named him the world’s top sports agent in 2019, when he negotiated $1.42bn (£1.04bn) in active contracts and transfer fees.
The following year Stellar was sold to the American entertainment agency ICM Partners, before it in turn was acquired by the Hollywood giants Creative Artists Agency in a deal worth a reported $750m. Within 12 months CAA had been ranked as the world’s most valuable sports agency on Forbes’ 2022 list.
After the CAA acquisition Barnett stayed to run the football division as executive chair of CAA Stellar before stepping down in February 2024.
Barnett faces allegations he “trafficked” a woman from Australia to the UK in 2017 and kept her as a “sex slave”. Barnett denies the allegations. CAA said it first learned of the allegations in January 2024.
Football made him wealthy but Barnett’s initial move away from his family’s casino business, the Curzon House Group, was in advising promising heavyweight boxer Lennox Lewis to pursue a professional career. Stellar’s first clients were the Pakistan cricketers Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis during their controversial 1992 tour of England, but it was West Indian Brian Lara who helped them really make their mark.
Barnett and Manasseh helped arrange Lara’s move to Warwickshire shortly before he scored a then world-record 375 against England in Antigua in April 1994, and two months later he broke the record for the highest first class score by scoring 501 not out for his new county against Durham. “We were the best at that [cricket] in a short time, but there was no money,” Barnett said in an interview with ESPN in 2017.
Such brashness was typical of Barnett’s professional style, although it was allied to a work ethic that delivered his big break and also underpinned Stellar’s relentless rise to represent 600 footballers at their peak a decade ago. He was also polite and approachable when on business, ending phone calls with the words “God bless!”
As Stellar was growing other agents reported with a mixture of bewilderment and awe that Barnett was never in his Hyde Park office and appeared to live in his Bentley, driving around the country to watch youth-team fixtures and reserve games in the hope signing the best up-and-coming talent. One day trip to Chesterfield for an England Under-18 game in the mid-1990s was particularly productive, as he returned to London with agreements to represent two future senior England internationals, Ashley Cole and Ledley King.
Volume and youth soon became the company’s modus operandi, with Barnett once estimating that 95% of Stellar’s ever-growing players had signed for them before the age of 18. Unlike other agents Barnett rarely showed any interest in representing managers, instead focusing on securing the best youngsters with increasing success.
From the late 1990s onwards almost every England squad contained several of Barnett’s players, including players such as Peter Crouch, Jermain Defoe, Kieron Dyer, Darren Bent, Mason Mount and Ben Chilwell. Following the American buyouts they have remained dominant, with current England stars Jordan Pickford, Jack Grealish, Ivan Toney and Dean Henderson on the company’s books, while Manasseh negotiated Liam Delap’s £30m move from Ipswich to Chelsea last month. As the game has globalised CAA Stellar’s fleet of Bentleys has been replaced by private jets, with their agents flying all over Europe and more recently to Saudi Arabia to seal transfer deals.
The biggest deal of Barnett’s career was Gareth Bale’s £85.3m transfer from Tottenham to Real Madrid in 2013, then a world record. The Wales international’s move to Tottenham was also brokered by Barnett, who had represented him since he was on a schoolboy contract at Southampton.
While Bale won 16 trophies including three La Liga titles and five Champions Leagues at Real his time at the Bernabéu ended sourly, not helped by a very public argument between Barnett and the club’s manager Zinedine Zidane, who he accused of freezing Bale out.
That row was not the first time Barnett attracted controversy in a colourful career. In 2006 he was banned from working as an agent for nine months by the FA for being found guilty of orchestrating a meeting between Cole and the Chelsea manager José Mourinho, when the player was under contract to Arsenal. The fallout damaged Cole’s relationship with Arsenal and he subsequently signed for Chelsea anyway.
After dabbling with the then-growing Chinese market, holding talks about selling Stellar to the Rastar Group in 2016, Barnett focused on expansion in the US. Repeated attempts to recruit NFL players brought only occasional successes, but repeatedly touring the US ultimately led to the ICM and CAA sales.
