Mino Raiola, the superagent loved by football’s biggest stars

Whatever you may think about Mino Raiola, be sure about one thing. He wouldn’t give a damn.

“My father said to me when I was a small boy that 50 per cent of the people in your life will love you and 50 per cent will hate you,” Raiola told The Athletic just over a year ago. Proof enough was in the Bible. Even Jesus Christ was crucified, he’d quip. “I’m here to be loved by my family and by my players. The rest? I don’t give a shit.”

The 54-year-old died on Saturday after a long illness. In a statement, the Raiola family said he “fought until the end with the same strength he put on negotiation tables to defend our players.”

Born in Nocera Inferiore, south east of Naples, and described with the self-deprecating humour typical of Raiola as “the ugliest baby ever seen”, he was raised in nearby Angri, a case of nominative determinism if ever there was one.

In his novel, Hanno Tutti Ragione, Oscar-winning film director Paolo Sorrentino calls it “the worst province in the world”. But the San Marzano tomatoes and Mozzarella di Bufala cheese produced around there are the ingredients that go into the best pizza on the planet and that’s what the Raiola family imported when they moved to the Netherlands and opened a restaurant, called Napoli, in Haarlem, just west of Amsterdam.

Raiola never made a pizza in his life. The idea that he had done came from Sinisa Mihajlovic, who famously said: “What’s the pizzaiolo want now?” after Raiola stood up for Zlatan Ibrahimovic in the aftermath of a Derby d’Italia between Inter Milan and Juventus when the two players — now great friends — trash-talked one another. What is true is that he waited tables and washed floors. He worked long hours, doing the dirty work, and as he got older he came to be entrusted with the books and negotiations with the restaurant’s suppliers. “My speciality was untying knots” in order to get Napoli the best deal possible, he said.

The restaurant was his business school and university of life, teaching him about enterprise and people at a very young age. When a customer ordered the most expensive bottle on the wine list but didn’t look like he could afford it, Raiola was told to serve him anyway. The lesson was: Don’t underestimate anyone. It was a mistake many would make with Raiola.

Ibrahimovic did just that after walking into the Okura hotel in Amsterdam to meet him for the first time.

“We’d booked a table there, and I really didn’t know what sort of a person to expect,” he wrote in his eponymous biography I Am Zlatan Ibrahimovic, “probably some sort of pinstriped fella with an even bigger gold watch (than me). 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’s break in football came while patrons of Napoli were breaking bread.

The headquarters of the Dutch FA was nearby. An Italian agent who used to bring players over from the Eredivisie to Serie A liked the food on the menu, as did a few footballers and the owner of the local football club, who would make Raiola the head of their academy and then sporting director. Little did they all know that the guy topping up their wine glasses and bringing over the bill was a superagent-in-waiting, one of the biggest movers and shakers the game would ever see.

“I have changed the game, from an economical side, more than once,” Raiola told The Athletic.

After buying a Mcdonald’s franchise and flipping it, burger-style, for a profit, Raiola formed a company called Intermezzo and entered the transfer market. “In the Netherlands, there used to be a really crazy system where players had to be sold according to a price that was based on their age and a bunch of statistical crap,” Ibrahimovic recalled. “(Mino) challenged the entire Netherland Football Association, and he didn’t start off dealing with small fry.”

The first deal Raiola ever did involved the hottest prospect in Dutch football at the time, Bryan Roy, who moved from Ajax to Foggia in 1992.

“He phoned me from the restaurant,” Foggia’s former owner Pasquale Casillo recalls in the book Due o Tre Cose Che So Di Lui (Two or Three Thing I Know About Him). “’You’re paying four billion lire for the player. I can get you him for two’. He did just that, cutting out the intermediary fees. He put me in direct contract with the Dutch Players’ Association — he was registered with them. I never understood what his title was, given he used to serve pizzas. Anyway, he shows up in Foggia with Roy, as his interpreter — or that’s what he told me.”

The way Casillo remembers it, Raiola didn’t even see himself as an agent at the time. He was critical of them. They were “scoundrels” and “leeches”. “Now he’s the king of the agents.

“Twenty years ago, he was just a big obese kid. He used to beg me for a spin in my Ferrari — ‘You can as long as you get into it’. He did, but getting him out of it again was an effort.

“Roy, meanwhile, was shocked when he realised we trained on a dirt patch in the oratory of San Ciro. You used to have to scale a wall to get in. Can you imagine? He was a Holland international who came from Ajax. But he got used to it soon enough.” Thanks in part to Raiola, who moved out to Puglia, the heel of the boot of Italy, with Roy and would drive him to and from training. “Mino painted the walls of my house,” Roy recalled. “He doesn’t like it when I remind him of that now.”

On the back of Roy’s move to Serie A, Raiola was the architect of Dennis Bergkamp and Wim Jonk making the double switch to Inter from Ajax a year later. Expectations were high, particularly after the successes of their countrymen Marco van Basten, Frank Rijkaard and Ruud Gullit at city rivals AC Milan. Bergkamp surprisingly flopped and suffered the comparison with fellow forward Van Basten, who was adoringly known as ‘The Swan of Utrecht’. Bergkamp by contrast came to be dubbed ‘The Cold Turkey’.

He would more than bounce back at Arsenal, of course, as Raiola would by bringing Pavel Nedved from Sparta Prague to Lazio the following summer. “(Lazio coach Zdenek Zeman) wanted a player who could dribble like Maradona, run 17km a game and train like a madman. I told him, ‘That player doesn’t exist’.” But this 23-year-old Czech winger Raiola was on the brink of moving to PSV Eindhoven after helping his country be surprise finalists at Euro 96 came closest to fitting the bill. There was just one problem: “He didn’t know how good he was, otherwise he would have won the Ballon d’Or three times.”

Nedved has only one of those awards on his mantlepiece today. Ibrahimovic, the most famous of all Raiola clients, never got the votes to win even one, but in Italy, you could be forgiven for thinking he has 10 of them.

Arguably no foreign import to Serie A this century has had the impact the Swedish striker did.

Raiola waves to the crowd when taking Matthijs de Ligt from Ajax to Juventus in 2019 (Photo: Mauro Ujetto/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

The kid from the gritty Rosengard district of urban Malmo saw himself in Raiola. When he asked Ajax team-mate Maxwell to text the agent and set up a meeting, Ibrahimovic wasn’t discouraged when a reply came back saying: “Tell this Zlatan to go and fuck himself’.” It was a language he understood and respected. “I had grown up with that attitude — ‘Go fuck yourself’, and stuff. I feel comfortable with that council-estate talk and I suspect that Mino and I had similar backgrounds. Neither of us had been handed anything on a plate.”

Raiola wasn’t going to bring him a big move on a silver platter either. He told Ibrahimovic his stats were “crap” and a club like Juventus were never going to sign him unless he got serious. Time to ditch the Porsche for a FIAT Stilo, sell off his watches and hang the leather jacket up in the wardrobe. Raiola pushed him to the limit. “It got me going,” Ibrahimovic remembered, “and it got me more of a winner’s mindset.”

The result was the move he wanted. Upon seeing Raiola in Hawaiian-print shorts, drenched in sweat after rushing to the meeting they’d set up to seal the deal in Monte Carlo on the weekend of the 2004 Monaco Grand Prix, Juventus general manager Luciano Moggi asked witheringly: “What the hell are you wearing?” The reply was quintessentially Raiola. “Are you here to check out what I look like?”

Style never mattered to him. Substance did.

“I’ve been in the business 27 years,” he told The Athletic, “and in all those years I’ve represented the best of the best. There must be a reason why people still buy Rolls-Royces and Bentleys and Ferraris and Porsches. It must be quality. If players trust my agency and trust what I do, it’s something good that I’m doing, because it cannot be my looks, because the last time I looked in the mirror I would not have chosen to represent myself.”

The reflection staring back at Raiola never discomforted him even amid public fallouts with Sir Alex Ferguson and Pep Guardiola. Fearless in standing up for his clients, they, for the most part, stood by him regardless of the accusations of greed, self-interest and excess that peaked after Paul Pogba’s €110 million return to Manchester United following four years at Juventus. The commission from that transfer, revealed by the hacking platform Football Leaks, served as one of the motivations for FIFA to toughen up the rules, reintroduce a licensing system and propose a cap which united the game’s superagents in protest.

“I know where I come from and I know in which world I live,“ Raiola told The Athletic, ”and I’m not saying I work harder than a mine worker. But my luck is that I work in an environment, in an industry, that became a multi-billion industry.

“OK, so I am sure there’s an agent in cycling that works as hard as I do and maybe is as good as I am or better but his world, his sport’s world, his industry, is smaller. So our earnings are a reflection of the importance of our industry and the importance of our clients, like if you were an agent of the best actor in the world or the agent of I don’t know who. And people take that out of context.

“So again, I don’t see that we are criminalised anymore. I think the public knows now how it is and we are a part of this industry, because if you were to take out even you guys in journalism, if you were to take out the ‘calcio mercato’ (transfer market) that was created by the big agents, then there is only football Saturday and Sunday. What the hell do you write about from Monday to Friday (then), you guys?!

“It became a part of the entertainment industry that now today is much bigger than only the game, like the gaming industry, like the transfer market et cetera. It’s not an easy job! It’s a fantastic job. It’s not an easy job. And yeah, being in a highly, highly monetised environment gives you this kind of money, but you don’t criticise the people that on the stock exchange make a lot of money because billions go between their hands. That’s a part of what they’re in.”

Whatever the outrage at the vast amounts of money he was perceived to take out of the game, whatever disconnect there was between a superagent like Raiola and the public, the empathy he was able to strike up with some of the next big things in football remained undiminished. It’s enough to think of Matthijs de Ligt, Gianluigi Donnarumma and Ryan Gravenberch, to name but a few.

On the day Raiola’s death was announced, Borussia Dortmund striker Erling Haaland, another client, was succinct in his tribute.

Two words and a photo of them together were all he tweeted.

The message simply read: “The best”.

The kind of esteem that mattered to Raiola.

(Top images: Getty Images)