Jon Smith | The Original 'Super-Agent'

Giving The Game Away

Asif Kapadia’s 2019 documentary shows that, ironically for a man with such gifted ball control, in Naples, almost everything else in Maradona's life progressively slipped from his grasp. The fame and notoriety that his unique talent brought, was sadly accompanied by unwanted and harmful attention from outside influences and as a result, his departure from Naples could not have been more different to the fanfare he was greeted with upon arrival in 1984. ⠀ ⠀

Too often, not enough attention is paid to the themes that ran beneath Maradona’s genius talent, contributing to his off-field demise. For our giveaway session, we invited on Jon Smith, Maradona's agent during his time in Naples, to divulge how the relationship between Maradona's genius-level talent and the Neapolitan Camorra, grew to become horribly dysfunctional. As Jon says, the answer may lie in the fact that there were two people: “there was Diego and there was Maradona.”⠀ ⠀

Jon’s powerful influence in helping to create the Premier League is something that is felt by football fans today and over the past two decades, having worked with Sky and Rupert Murdoch, Jon helped to enable the first true revolution of football. Jon's current view is that the most powerful man in football is now Mark Zuckerberg and in our giveaway with Jon, we are therefore able to chat to the man who played a part in football’s first revolution, about the next frontier to be pushed – the involvement of tech companies like Amazon and Google in football.⠀ ⠀

Jon's resume boasts a 25 year career that has seen him meet Donald Trump, deal with Vladimir Putin, and act on behalf of clients ranging from Ian Botham to Andrey Arshavin. Not surprisingly, it is a career that we’re incredibly happy to delve into in our most recent giveaway session.