FOOTBALL Agents may be the curse of most chairman's life but a new no-nonsense approach to them at the County Ground ensures Town will not be messed around, writes ANDY CRYER.

Swindon chief Andrew Fitton admits his first few months' experience of running a football club has proved a big learning curve but insists his newness to the game has proved beneficial when it comes to the transfer market.

An agents charter' has been drawn up by Fitton & Co laying down the rules to players' agents and the Town chairman insists if these are broken, any potential business will immediately be ended.

Fitton, pictured, believes the policy has helped their relationship with agents in their first few months at the club - claiming they cannot afford to be dragged into trying to meet agents' demands.

While he revealed on Saturday his belief that Cardiff-bound Miguel Comminges had had his "head turned" by his agent, Fitton insisted that on the whole the club's relationship with player representatives has been better than most.

He said: "We are new to running a football club and so it is a steep learning curve at times but I also think our freshness helps our outlook at times.

"We have set our own rules, because we know how things are done in normal business, and we have put into place an agents charter that they all need to read before we will even think about dealing with them.

"One of the points in our policy is we won't negotiate a deal and then see the agents looking for a fee to be paid. It is up to the players to pay their own agents at Swindon and that is a rule that will not change."

Some clubs' distrust of agents have them seen them being banned from any transfer dealings but Fitton believes a total ban would be cutting their nose off to spite their face.

He said: "It is simple really, the agents either adhere to our rules or they do business elsewhere. Some clubs won't deal with them at all but I don't see the point in that.

"We could be missing out on players by doing that.

"So what we have done is fair I think, we just won't pay the fees of agents because that is down to the players.

"I don't know whether this is unique in football.

"All it is is we have a policy statement saying how we will deal with them.

"We have actually not had problems with the agents.

"I think that is because they have read our policy statement and known what they are going to be dealing with."