This lecture examines how athlete contracts are negotiated and shaped in practice by representation and collective structures. It starts with the structural problem: professional sport often involves a pronounced power imbalance between individual athletes and well-resourced sporting institutions, compounded by the finite length of sporting careers. Representation emerges as a response in two forms — the private solution (agents) and the collective solution (players associations). The lecture maps how agent activity is regulated, what a representation agreement typically contains, and how the collective dimension operates through players associations, collective bargaining, and industrial action dynamics.