Hers is a lurching story, as she says. Or, rather, swings. First it was football, then journalism, later marketing and, finally, entrepreneurship. Carlota Planas, a girl raised in Portugal who decided to cut his hair and change his name to pass as a boy and be able to play football, Today she is the first woman to run a soccer player representation company.
Unik Sports Management, as this agency is called, is exclusively focused on female playersalready manages the careers of some 40 athletes, grew by 40% last year and works convinced that the business will grow another 30% in 2022. “I am living the reality that I have always wanted through my players,” synthesizes Planas. “Since I have this inside 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 the cycle began to close: internships in the newspaper As, first coverage at the Camp Nou, first contacts with footballers 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 -such as Sandro Rosell, the former president of Barça, hiring 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 run 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. And she then she created Unik Sports Management. This time allied with another agent, Arkaitz Coca, and 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 raised. “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”, details Planas, that generates income by keeping a percentage of any contract that the athlete closes.
This is how he has worked with the Majorcans Patri Guijarro, Mariona Caldentey, Cata Coll or Maitane López, in addition to, for example, Leila Ouahabi, Claudia Pina, Lola Gallardo, Estefanía Banini and 35 other 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 it was almost inevitable to expose it (“it looked good to do it”), that then people began to consume it more and that it has finally 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,” recalls Planas. “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 viewers as Survivors. The difference in brand interest, he says, is “huge.”
Hence, his great challenge as a professional is, currently, hit the prices at which it closes its commercial agreements. She is so convinced that this furor has only just begun that she knows almost certainly 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 don’t want to move from this industry”, concludes Planas, whoue does not close the door completely to new projects. “As long as it’s adding to the industry, I’m going to consider it,” she concludes.