What a paid football agent list actually sells you

The product is contact details

That is the thing being sold: email addresses and phone numbers, assembled and offered at a price. It is a real product with a real cost of assembly.

It is not verification. An email address does not tell you whether the holder is licensed, registered, active or interested, and those are the four things a player actually needs to know.

The free registers do the harder part

FIFA's directory establishes the licence. The FA's register establishes registration in England. The FA's transaction record establishes actual involvement in deals.

None of those is behind a paywall, and together they answer the questions that decide whether somebody should be dealt with at all.

What a contact list is genuinely for

Outreach at scale, by somebody whose job that is: a club, an academy, a commercial partner, a journalist.

For an individual player it is close to worthless, because the constraint is not knowing where to send an email. It is that an unsolicited email from an unknown player is the least effective route into representation there is.

The undated copy problem

Registers change: licences are granted, lapse and are withdrawn. A copy taken from one is a copy of the day it was taken.

Almost nothing on the market publishes the date of its snapshot, which is why so much of it is quietly out of date. If you buy one, ask when it was compiled, and check anybody you actually intend to contact against the live register anyway. At which point you have done the free check, which was the check that mattered.