Premier League clubs paid just over £67m to agents over the past 12 months, marginally down on the previous year, when the figure was £70.69m . In only the second year of the league’s publication of fees, all 20 clubs’ aggregate payments were listed in the total of £67,138,040.40. Twelve provided a number to the last penny.

Liverpool fans may wonder how the club could afford to spend more than £9m on agents, when they were so close to going to the wall over its inability to pay interest on £350m loans to Royal Bank of Scotland and Wells Fargo bank. That sum made them the second-highest payers in the Premier League, with only Chelsea‘s £9.29m exceeding it. The sums detailed relate to payments for player transfers in and out of the clubs and also to payments for contract renegotiations.

Given that these payments are routinely made over the life of a player’s contract, there is a lag over the impact of monies due to agents. This might help explain why the fees payable to agents in 2010 declined only marginally from the year before, despite a dramatic drop in transfer fees paid.

During January this year and the close season £380m was paid by Premier League clubs in transfer fees. In 2009 the transfer-fee spend for the English top flight was £620m. This constituted a 38.7% year-on-year fall in the amount paid to other clubs. Yet the decline in the amounts agents were paid over the past 12 months was only 5%, or £3.5m. Most notable was the saving of nearly £7m for Manchester City’s owner, Sheikh Mansour, in what the Eastlands club paid to agents over the year.

There was also an economy announced at West Ham United, who changed ownership this year, of more than £2m, and Arsenal and Wigan Athletic also paid more than £1m less to agents over the 12-month period.

Portsmouth, who were relegated last season, had paid more alone than all three promoted clubs combined, with Ian Holloway’s Blackpool spending only £45,000 on agents’ fees. But aAlthough these broad economies might have had an effect, other clubs’ fees rose significantly year on year. Liverpool’s were up £2.3m, Sunderland’s by £2.4m, Everton’s by almost £1.6m, Stoke City’s by £1.2m and Manchester United’s by almost £800,000.

Fulham, Aston Villa and Birmingham City between them accounted for another £1.7m extra paid to agents.