When Zlatan Ibrahimovic wanted a new agent he asked a friend, the Dutch journalist Thijs Slegers, for a couple of suggestions. The first one to come back was the firm that represented David Beckham. “They’re supposed to be terrific,” Slegers said. “And then, there’s another guy but, well …”
“Well, what?” Ibrahimovic replied.
“He’s a mafioso,” Slegers said, his tongue in his cheek.
“Mafioso sounds good,” Ibrahimovic said.
“The guy wasn’t actually a mafioso,” Ibrahimovic continued, in his autobiography, I am Zlatan Ibrahimovic, as told to David Lagercrantz. “He just looked and acted like one. His name was Mino Raiola.”
Raiola, the 48-year-old Italy-born, Monaco-based, Dutch national is now a don in the cut-throat world that he has inhabited for the past 25 years or so, having enjoyed a ludicrously bountiful summer. It has not only been Ibrahimovic whom he has moved to José Mourinho’s new project at Manchester United but Henrikh Mkhitaryan and, most eye-catching of all, Paul Pogba – in a world record £93.2m deal from Juventus.
According to Forbes, Raiola’s Maguire Tax & Legal company, which he named in tribute to the fictitious movie agent Jerry “Show me the Money” Maguire, had taken commissions, as of September 2015, of $28.6m. His slice of the Pogba deal alone has netted him around £20m.
It is a staggering subplot to an extraordinary transfer that has ticked every box for Raiola, not least the one marked revenge. It is fair to say that not everybody likes this combative, direct and sometimes volatile character, and the former Manchester United manager, Sir Alex Ferguson, is prominent on his list of enemies.
Pogba was a teenage reserve-team player at Old Trafford when Raiola spotted something in him and signed him as his client before taking him, at 19, from United to Juventus in 2012. Ferguson was furious. “There are one or two football agents I simply do not like and Mino Raiola is one of them,” he has said. “I distrusted him from the moment I met him.”
Pogba’s return from Turin to Manchester as an A-list star has allowed Raiola to bask in a feeling of vindication – as well as the pay cheque of a lifetime. He has in effect proved to Ferguson that it was the right move to allow Pogba to develop at Juventus.
Raiola’s personal windfall has been triggered by the clause that he inserted into Pogba’s contract at Juventus that entitled him to a 20% cut of any future sale – to be paid on top of the fee. Raiola has collected a further undisclosed figure for his specific work on the transfer.
As an aside it is interesting that United have used Raiola this summer, rather than Mourinho’s agent, Jorge Mendes. Mourinho has a long history of signing Mendes’s clients.
Those who know Raiola well, including Slegers, talk of a passionate, football-obsessed workaholic. “He is extremely loyal to the people who are in his inner circle and that means his players,” Slegers said. “To him they are like family. And that’s why he is the perfect negotiator because you always want to do the best for your family.
“He has a good sense of humour and he likes to be provocative but in a way that is quite funny. Some people think he is cocky and, if you don’t know him and maybe you just see his quotations, you can think he is crazy but he is not. He stands up for his players.”
The story about Ibrahimovic’s first meeting with Raiola bears retelling. The Swedish striker was at Ajax and he had received an overture from Raiola via his team-mate Maxwell, a Brazilian left-back whom Raiola represented then and now.
Ibrahimovic told Maxwell to inform Raiola that, if the agent had something specific to put on the table, he would meet him; otherwise, he was not interested. The message came back from Raiola. “Tell this Zlatan to go and fuck himself.” Perversely, it struck a chord with Ibrahimovic, who had grown up around this kind of attitude.
The meeting was set for the sushi restaurant at Amsterdam’s swanky Okura hotel and Ibrahimovic wore Gucci and parked his Porsche outside. “I didn’t really know what sort of person to expect, probably some sort of pinstriped fella with an even bigger gold watch,” Ibrahimovic said. “But who the hell turned up? A bloke in jeans and a Nike T-shirt – and that belly, like one of the guys in The Sopranos.”
Raiola, in between stuffing himself with enough food to feed five people, according to Ibrahimovic, produced statistics that showed how far his lunch companion was lagging behind the leading strikers of the day. He told him to sell his car and his watches. Hard work, he added, would be everything. The material things would come on the back of playing success.
Ibrahimovic listened. And he did as he was told. He and plenty of Raiola’s other clients credit him with instilling focus in them and a winning mentality. Raiola is relentless and his motivational method is invariably the stick, rather than the carrot. It produces results.
Raiola has been able to tap into the psyche of his clients, possibly because he comes from a similar background to many of them, one in which he had to fight for everything he got. Born in Salerno, southern Italy, Raiola moved to the Dutch city of Haarlem with his family as a baby. They opened a pizzeria and, as a boy, he would clean, wash dishes and wait tables.
Raiola had his finger in many pies as a young man. He began to look after the books at the pizzeria, he studied law, he became a director at the local football club and he learned languages. He can speak Italian, Dutch, English, French, German, Spanish and Portuguese.
He wanted to be a football agent, though, and his break came when he was asked by Rob Jansen, one of the leading agents in the Netherlands, to help out as an interpreter on Dennis Bergkamp’s transfer from Ajax to Internazionale in 1993. Raiola was given a job at Jansen’s company only to walk out to set up on his own. Jansen is now another of his enemies.
Raiola wants to do everything on his own. Being a part of a large company is not for him; he endeavours to provide a personal service for his clients. His first big deal took Pavel Nedved from Sparta Prague to Lazio after Euro 96 and, thanks to pushy networking and the use of intermediaries, things have snowballed. Raiola’s current talent roster also features Romelu Lukaku, Blaise Matuidi and Mario Balotelli.
So many people have tales to tell about Raiola, both good and bad but always dramatic. Ibrahimovic is fond of the one about how Raiola burst into a VIP room at Monaco airport to negotiate his transfer from Ajax to Juventus in 2004 wearing Hawaiian shorts and a T-shirt. Luciano Moggi, the Juventus general manager, was nonplussed.
Raiola did not care and he does not care. His preoccupation is simply to do the best he can for himself and his players. “He was completely fearless and prepared to pull any number of tricks, and that sounded good,” Ibrahimovic said, at the time when he was considering whether to appoint Raiola. “I didn’t want to have another nice boy. I wanted to be transferred and get a good contract.”