Hers is a lurching story, as she says. Or, rather, swings. First it was football, then journalism, later marketing and, finally, entrepreneurship. Charlotte Planesa girl raised in Portugal who decided to cut her hair and change her name to pass for a boy and be able to play football, is today the first woman to run a company that represents footballers.
Unik Sports Management, as this agency is called, is exclusively focused on female players, it already manages the careers of some 40 athletes, grew by 40% last year and works convinced that the business will grow another 30% this 2022. “I am living the reality that I have always wanted through my players”, synthesizes Plan. “Since I have this inside of me that I couldn’t do it, I wanted to try that the next generations of athletes could,” he explains.
Because this 30-year-old businesswoman played soccer until the lack of role models and the desire to secure a career led her to study journalism and business administration and management. And there she began to close the cycle: internships in the newspaper As, first coverage at the Camp Nou, first contacts with soccer players and a great discovery: “Many did not have agents to support them on the commercial side.” She, having also been a Nike model and having contacts in that environment, began to act as an occasional liaison, until she decided to devote herself completely to what she, she believed, could be her new profession.
After several more somersaults -like Sandro Rosell, the former president of Barça, hired her to be part of a project he was preparing in Africa- Planas set up Be Universal, a platform to put female athletes in Spain in contact with brands that wanted to do advertising campaigns with them. That lasted until years later, at the gates of the pandemic, her investment partners wanted to shape the project in ways that she did not quite agree with. She and she then she created Unik Sports Management. This time she allied with another agent, Arkaitz Cocaand dedicated exclusively to women’s football.
“We entered with a very clear idea that came from what he had experienced with men’s football: why do they have to have so many people when they can manage everything from the same agency?” he asked. “We came out with a very specific 360 offer: representation, marketing, extra-labour or financial advice, sports contracts, being there if they wanted to buy a house… even to look for a car at dawn,” he details. Planwhich generates income by keeping a percentage of any contract that the athlete closes.
This is how he worked with Leila Ouahabicon claudia pina, Patri Pebble, Lola Gallardo, Stephanie Banini and another 35 soccer players in Spain, England, Italy, Portugal, France, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico and even Japan.
Much of the key is the rise that women’s football has experienced in general in recent years. This entrepreneur associates the phenomenon with a cocktail of factors: that the role of women has been revalued in all sectors, that this made it almost inevitable to expose it (“it was good to do so”), that then people began to consume it more and that finally It has become a profitable business.
“I remember perfectly that at the beginning a player asked me for some boots and I didn’t get them: I had to go buy them and tell her that they had given them to me,” he recalls. Plan. “Now that same player has a very large agreement with that brand and she has material to bore,” says the expert, who offers yet another proof: last week, Spain’s match at the European Championship had as many audiences as Survivors. The difference in brand interest, she says, is “huge.”
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Hence, his great challenge as a professional is, currently, to hit the prices at which he closes his commercial agreements. She is so convinced that this furor has only just begun that she almost certainly knows that in three years’ time the rates agreed upon now will fall short.
It is just as clear that, by then, she will continue in this sector. “I am very restless, there are two or three new things that I am working on, but always linked to football: what is clear to me is that I do not want to move from this industry,” he concludes. Plan, which does not completely close the door to new projects. “As long as it’s adding to the industry, I’m going to consider it,” she concludes.
the first director
He wanted to be a footballer and make a living from it, but life (and being born twenty years soon) was put in front of him. In the end, after taking several stumbles, Carlota Planas has become the first woman director of a soccer player representation agency. For others to achieve, she says, what she could not. In her portfolio there are names like Leila Ouahabi, Claudia Pina, Patri Guijarro or Lola Gallardo. In total, some 40 athletes from various parts of the world who can call her both to manage a transfer and to get a car at dawn if hers leaves them lying around.