Coronavirus: Top Ghanaian football agent stuck in US due to border closure

Stuck in a country thousands of miles away from where a significant size of his clients practice their profession, Oliver Arthur, CEO of Arthur Legacy has had to devise means to monitor the activities of his players and deliver on his responsibility as the man whose topmost priority is to protect the interest of his players.

Arthur would have loved to be in Italy or maybe Ghana but an assignment clashed with the unexpected closures of the borders of Ghana, Italy and the United States means he is unable to fly to any of his preferred destinations.

Arthur speaks to GhanaWeb on being stuck in the United States, the purpose of his trip and how is coping with the ‘new normal’ of spending virtually every day in a room.

“I’m in Atlanta and it wasn’t planned to stay in here now. I came in to prepare for a tournament we were organizing for Ashgold and I got into this lockdown situation. Borders have been closed so you cant go out. I can’t go back to Italy where I do a lot of my business and I can’t come to Ghana because it is still closed”.

But with the help of technology, Arthur is keeping close tabs on his clients who are dotted across the various divisions in Italian and few others in other European leagues.

One major topic that has risen from the coronavirus pandemic is the issue of salary cuts.

As clubs bid to protect their staff and prevent the clubs from going into administration, various measures have been implemented including slashing down the salaries of footballers and other staff.

Convincing a player to let go a certain percentage of his salary to salvage a situation he did not play a part in requires a certain level of negotiation skills.

Clubs have largely been successful in talking down agents and their players to take salary cuts albeit a few exceptions as in the case of Mesut Ozil and Arsenal.



But how does an agent gets into the minds of his players and convince them to accept the cuts? Arthur details it to ghanaweb.com.

“What I tell my players is we have nurses, Healthline workers going to the field to risk their lives to help in this situation. As a player what are you also doing to help? Because at the end of the day when your clubs have filed for bankruptcy, it will affect you also. So you also look at the situation and ask how you can I help”.

“One way you can help is to accept this pay cut when it comes up. We are also looking at situations where clubs should not be able to cheat players because some clubs might be in good standing and are okay to go through it but because they want to increase profit they also have to take pay cuts”, he said.