The agent who won a nine-year legal battle to prove a catalogue of wrongdoing by the England assistant manager Sammy Lee, the former Bolton midfielder Gavin McCann, Bolton Wanderers and the agents SEM, has accused the Football Association of being a weak enforcer of its own rules and “not fit for purpose.”
The court of appeal has upheld the findings of a 2014 high court judgment that in June 2007 McCann had agreed the agent Tony McGill would act for him, but at the last minute SEM poached the player, a backdated contract was sent to the FA, and Lee, the SEM agents and other witnesses lied in court. Bolton paid SEM, whose chief executive at the time was the well-known agent Jerome Anderson, a £300,000 agent’s fee for, Judge Waksman found, doing “little or nothing.”
When Waksman ruled September 2014 that Dave Sheron, an unlicensed agent, had been involved in the deal, that SEM did poach McCann, that the contract was false as it had been backdated, and that Lee and others had lied in court, McGill said he sent the high court judgment to the FA.
“I got nothing back from them,” he said. “I have dealt with numerous people over the years at the FA; there are a lot of good and nice people, but on the compliance side, they are weak. I have told them that t hey should pay me my money back, that as an agent, working to their rules, they owed me a duty of care. I’m working underneath their umbrella but they have done nothing; I am afraid they are not fit for purpose.”
After SEM poached McCann from him, McGill complained to the FA immediately, on 8 June 2007, but when the governing body failed to discipline anyone, he took legal action, first suing McCann, who settled for £50,000, then SEM and Bolton.
“I don’t like cheats,” McGill told to the Guardian, “and I just decided I wasn’t going to stand for it.”
He said the FA would give him no information about how the deal had been done after McCann was poached away from him, claiming it had to keep them confidential, so he had to obtain the relevant documents via expensive court applications. It was only by legal disclosure he saw the contract which had been sent to the FA and that it had been obviously backdated, in pen, by hand.
Waksman found this was done by SEM, to falsely represent they had been acting for McCann a week longer than they had. Bolton’s then chairman Phil Gartside, an FA board member at the time, was found to have dissembled about when he signed the contract, before admitting it was on 8 June 2007, not on 1 June as the contract had been changed to say.
Altogether, McGill said the legal actions had cost him “an awful lot of money,” more than the £300,000 he would have earned had McCann stuck to their agreement and he had proceeded to complete the £1m basic salary per year deal for the player at Bolton. The court of appeal has agreed he is due damages for “unlawful means conspiracy” by SEM, and referred it back to Waksman to decide how much.
“I gave the FA everything through the years,” McGill said, “but they don’t seem to have any clout in compliance. I’m afraid it is as it says on the tin, they have done FA.”
The FA declined to comment following the court of appeal ruling, arguing that court proceedings are not yet complete.
Only the amount McGill can receive in damages has to be finalised; all the findings of fact against the parties have been established.
