An intermediary is someone who acts as an intermediary between two or more individuals or organizations . In this way, it is responsible for linking the different parties.
For example: "The Chinese player came to the club through an Iranian intermediary who was in charge of offering his services" , "The governor promised to be the intermediary between both mayors to try to bring their positions closer" , "If your boss wants "Tell me something, let him come in person and not send any intermediary."
Generally, the agent or representative of an athlete is called an intermediary. The intermediary is in charge of negotiating contracts , which is why he is the link between the player and the team.
Many times the intermediary is in charge of managing the careers of many players. In this way, you can contact the leaders of a club and offer them the services of several of your representatives.
The idea of intermediary, however, appears in multiple contexts. It can be said that a real estate agency is a firm that acts as an intermediary between the owners of a series of properties that they list in their catalog and those people who wish to rent or buy them. A supermarket , meanwhile, is an intermediary between producers and buyers. In both cases, the intermediary obtains an economic benefit (which can be obtained through a commission or the price difference when buying and selling).
Intermediaries, finally, can be subjects that someone sends to negotiate something or to carry a message. It is possible that a government sends an intermediary to another country to meet with its authorities and carry out some type of negotiation.
Summarizing everything explained so far, we can say that the figure of the intermediary has many forms, which vary largely according to the area in which they appear. On the one hand we have the legal intermediary , which can be either a natural person or a company, and carries out very specific tasks for which it has received academic training that allows it to know exactly how to proceed at each step, respecting certain rules . This figure cannot improvise his actions, but must be governed by the current laws of the region in which he works.
On the other hand, we have the figure of the intermediary that practically any individual can assume in a situation in which two or more people ask him to act to help them resolve a certain situation. In this case, the rules are set by the participants, so they can be different every time, even in the same group. For this reason, the role of an intermediary outside the legal field can fulfill an endless number of functions, ranging from the mere transmission of a message between two parties to sentimental support to solve a relationship problem.
But having said that we come to an important point regarding the perception that people have of this concept: although it is absolutely necessary in a large number of contexts to complete various processes, in everyday speech it is possible to assign it a negative connotation if it is of a "resource" that one of the parties uses to avoid direct contact with the other. In one of the examples in the second paragraph, a person complains that his interlocutor's boss has sent him as an intermediary and expresses the need to speak directly with him.
It is important to understand that in this and many other cases the intermediary is not a negative figure in itself, but rather the problem lies in the unwillingness of one of the parties to communicate face to face .