Small claims amount differs by state, I can't be bothered to look it up but 3500 might be pushing it for some states.
There are WAY more issues with this than the ones esportslaw mentioned, here are a few.
First, and by far foremost, is the issue of actually collecting anything. The biggest thing people don't realize when discussing lawsuits and payouts and who's owed what is that when you win in court you basically get a piece of paper saying "X owes Y $Z". That's it. If you got that piece of paper, what would you do? The correct answer for anything other than an extremely large amount of money is to sell it to a collection agency for pennies and forget about it. Actually making someone pay is incredibly difficult, especially if you don't know anything about them, know if they have any assets to leverage, maybe don't even know exactly where they are. And there are a LOT of legal protections - they get significant exemptions from seizure for houses, primary car, etc. If you do it wrong and try to collect illegally YOU will be in hot shit, so you need to hire professionals. You could easily spend a significant portion of the money on tracking him and his assets down and collection just to find out that he's too poor to actually get anything from. Simply put, if someone who isn't rich doesn't want to pay a small judgement, you can ding their credit a bit and almost nothing else.
Secondly, jurisdiction logistics etc. Where is the player and where is the manager? If they aren't in the same state it's a bit of a headache. It sounds like they might even be in separate countries - this would be enough to make a less sympathetic lawyer struggle to not laugh at you. How are you going to serve someone you only know over the internet (without spending a bunch)?
Even if you do go the small claims route, that just means you aren't paying a lawyer. Even if he had a great free lawyer the odds of actually getting anything out of a case like this are quite small - there are WAY more obstacles to pursuing a lawsuit over a small amount of money than just representation costs.