Soccer-Bournemouth's hefty agent fees worth it if club stay up - Howe

April 12 (Reuters) - The 7.4 million pounds ($9.24 million) Bournemouth spent on agent fees will be worth "every penny" if the south coast club avoid relegation from the Premier League, manager Eddie Howe has said. A Football Association report revealed Bournemouth spent the seventh highest amount on agent fees from January 2016 to February 2017, ahead of the likes of Tottenham Hotspur, Everton and Leicester City. In all, England's top-flight clubs spent close to 175 million pounds on agent fees over the same period. "It depends what you want to achieve. The bigger thing for us is to stay in the Premier League," Howe, whose side are 15th in the table and seven points above the relegation zone with six games left, told the Daily Echo. "That figure would be worth every penny if we do (stay up)." Howe lamented the amount of power agents are given by players during transfer negotiations. "Unfortunately these days, if you don't pay agents, you don't sign players. It's as simple as that. Signing players comes at a big cost, not just the transfer fee and wages of the player, but also the agent," Howe added. "A lot of the time, the agent will dictate where their player goes so, unfortunately, it's a sign of the modern times and the league we are in." ($1 = 0.8006 pounds) (Reporting by Shravanth Vijayakumar in Bengaluru; editing by Amlan Chakraborty)