In professional sports, a free agent is a player who is eligible to sign with any club or franchise, i.e. not under contract to any specific team. The term is also used in reference to a player who is under contract at present, but who is allowed to solicit contract offers from other teams. In some circumstances, the free agent's options are limited by league rules.
The term came into wider use after sports leagues stopped using a "reserve clause", which provided a repetitive option for the club to renew the contract for one or more years but did not allow the player to terminate it.
Read more about Free Agent: Drawbacks For Owners, Deadlines
Famous quotes containing the words free agent, free and/or agent:
““Under an accumulation of staggerers, no man can be considered a free agent. No man knocks himself down; if his destiny knocks him down, his destiny must pick him up again.””
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“Before abstraction everything is one, but one like chaos; after abstraction everything is united again, but this union is a free binding of autonomous, self-determined beings. Out of a mob a society has developed, chaos has been transformed into a manifold world.”
—Novalis [Friedrich Von Hardenberg] (1772–1801)
“Only a fully trained Jedi knight with the Force as his ally will conquer Vader and his emperor. If you end your training now—if you choose the quick and easy path, as Vader did—you will become an agent of evil.”
—Leigh Brackett (1915–1978)