Some call him the Jorge Mendes of women's soccer. “No, Carlota Planas”, she answers instantly. “He has his method of working, I have mine. The work of an agent is very personalized. I don't think there is a formula for success,” she explains. Carlota Planas (Barcelona, 1992), was the first woman to run a soccer player representation agency, Unik Sports. She currently represents more than thirty players from 18 different clubs and nine nationalities. With the Blaugrana Claudia Pina she signed her first contract as her agent: “Catching her at the age of 16 and ending up seeing her playing at the Camp Nou in front of 90,000 people was exciting. When I started representing her, she was at Barça B, she earned very little and we didn't know what was going to happen in her future. She personifies this evolution. It's what really motivates me to do what I do."
She describes herself as a "complete agent" and that's thanks to her multifaceted past. She was a futsal player and when she retired she began working in the newspaper As: "Being a journalist was the only way out she knew to stay connected to soccer, the only one in which she saw women." She got her first interview with Dani Alves thanks to the fact that she spoke Portuguese, having lived in Porto as a child, and she learned to see football from another perspective.
From there he jumped to a very different record by joining the scouting area of Sandro Rosell's Aspire Academy in Africa. “It was a stage that I really enjoyed because I experienced football from a very technical point of view. I had never seen so much football so often, ”he recalls. Thanks to this he learned how the clubs valued the players and how the market worked, something that would be vital in the creation of Unik Sports.
She was also a model in several Nike campaigns, where she discovered a great market opportunity: “I never saw professional players on set. I asked them why and they told me that there was no agency where I could check profiles, rates or availability, so I created it”. And thus, unconsciously, the first exclusive marketing agency for female athletes was born, which would later evolve and become the comprehensive representation agency that it is today.
Last May she was included in the prestigious Forbes list of influential young people under 30 years of age. "They called me on the phone and at first I didn't believe it, I thought it was a friend playing a joke on me," she recalls. Now, aware of the importance of such recognition, she hopes that the visibility she has "serves to open doors for someone." When she began to appear in the media, she received many messages from girls and women who wanted to know what they had to do to follow in her footsteps: "I did not know that being a representative was an option, now the new generations know that they have this way out and it is a pride," he says.
