Mino Raiola dies, the super agent of soccer players

Mino Raiola (Nocera Inferiore, Italy, 1967), one of the most important agents in today's football market and the man who changed the rules of buying and selling players by imposing his methods and exorbitant commissions on clubs, has died today at 54 years, according to Italian media.

The businessman, protagonist of the great operations of recent years, had been admitted for a long time.

Raiola was the agent for players like the Swedish Zlatan Ibrahimovic, the Frenchman Paul Pogba or the Dutchman Matthijs De Ligt.

But, above all, he is the man who was now negotiating the fate of the Norwegian player Erling Haaland, one of the big signings this summer.

An operation that could now be affected by the death of his great promoter.

Raiola, who had been in a very delicate state of health for months after being admitted last January to the ICU of the San Raffaele hospital in Milan, is the paradigm of a self-made businessman.

He arrived in Amsterdam at the age of one after a 1,900-kilometre drive from southern Italy.

His father, who had been a mechanic in Salerno, opened a pizzeria in Haarlem that he called Napoli.

Raiola worked there since he was little cleaning, acting as a waiter and even preparing the pizzas.

He studied some law, prepared himself with languages ​​(he spoke seven).

He expanded the business, bought and sold a McDonald's franchise in just two months, was Haarlem's sports director and started working at a football player representation agency (Intermezzo).

There he opposed a law that existed in the Netherlands,

according to which players should be valued through a series of parameters such as age and their statistics on the field.

He had several clashes with the Dutch Football Association and soon built a reputation as a representative who swims against the current: his last war was waged against FIFA – an organization he described as a mafia – and his intention to reduce agents' commissions : the mark of the house of the Italian agent.

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The football commissioners

The Raiola system was very handcrafted and completely based on his personality.

An element that would leave his entire business system up in the air (the company bears his own name).

The method, however, was clear.

Few players and a lot of mobility between clubs, whose managers usually end up facing him.

Most of the big names are in Italy: Mkhitaryan, Ibrahimovic, De Ligt, Donnarumma, De Vrij, Manolas... "He always ties them at the right time, like with Haaland," Marco Conterio, director of

, a medium specialized in market and agents, to draw a profile of the representative.

“Very few of his representatives have abandoned him.

He has a very close relationship with them.

He accompanies them on some trips, talks on the phone, advises them”, he insists.

With 99%, he says, they end up being friends.

He is the last great agent of the old school.

“In Jorge Mendes' agency, his great rival for market hegemony, many players have never seen him.

But Mino deals with everyone”, explained a person who knows both businessmen.

The method, obviously, pivoted on the commissions for each transfer.

In the one from Pogba to Manchester United, he pocketed 48 million euros, as was known through the

leak published by

(initially it was valued at 27).

For Ibrahimovic's move to Barça in 2014, where he only played one season, he earned around 11.5 million euros.

Raiola grew up, became independent and focused on catching big fish.

“First you have to be the best.

Then, the best paid ”, he usually tells them.

He made good friends in football, such as coach Zdeněk Zeman (then manager of Foggia and then of Lazio and Roma), who allowed him to do his first business in Italy.

In 1993 he sold Dennis Bergkamp to Inter and in 2001 he placed Pavel Nedved, then playing for Lazio, with Juventus for 41 million euros (where he won the Ballon d'Or).

An operation that underpinned his name in calcium – today his main market together with the Netherlands – and allowed him to establish a fruitful relationship with Juve until today through players like Pogba, De Ligt or Ibrahimovic himself, perhaps his franchise player and at that has moved more around the world.

Zlatan Ibrahimovic was Ajax's rising star at the time.

Tired of being compared to Marco Van Basten and his appetite for being number one unleashed, he called a journalist friend for an agent recommendation.

He was given two options: the agency that brought David Beckham or a guy whom his interlocutor considered a mobster.

"I want that one," replied the Swedish striker.

It was Carmine

Raiola, who represented his teammate, left back Maxwell, and he had almost the same thirst for victory.

Ibrahimovic, as he tells in the autobiography

(Corner, 2015

, soon discovered that they were soul mates and began one of the relationships with the most zeros in the history of football.

The forging of the method of an agent that in 2020 was capable of generating 721 million in contracts.

The first meeting was in a hotel.

Ibra showed up with her gold watch and Gucci leather jacket.

She parked her Porsche Carrera turbo at the gate and walked in expecting to find a guy dressed in a pinstripe suit and tie.

Raiola was wearing a Nike T-shirt, jeans and a belly like Tony Soprano's.

He had ordered more sushi than a football team could eat and listened to everything his future client had to say as he bingeed.

When everything seemed to be going well, he took out some printed pieces of paper and began to list the statistics of great strikers.

“Inzaghi, 25 games and 20 goals;

Vieri, 27 games and 24 goals;

Trezeguet, 24 games and 20 goals;

Ibrahimovic, 25 games and 5 goals.

Do you think I can sell you with statistics like these?

Get rid of your cars and watches and start training hard."

Told him.

The Porsche Carrera, by the way, ended up being driven by the agent's father.

Raiola, whose only big failure molding a star was Mario Balotelli, was a flamboyant guy and feared in offices.

He did not wear a suit and could appear in a tracksuit at meetings.

Or in shorts and flip-flops, as they feared that he would arrive at the Bernabéu to negotiate for Paul Pogba in 2015, when he opened an auction similar to the current one with Haaland.

Raiola doesn't care about physical appearance.

In fact, he cultivated that carelessness on purpose, he always explained, to throw off negotiations.

When he left for the Formula 1 Grand Prix in Monaco to deal with Moggi about Ibrahimovic's move to Juventus, he arrived sweaty and breathless in shorts and Nikes with no socks.

There he found the manager of Juve smoking a cigar.

“What the hell are you wearing to come here?” he blurted out.

"Have you come to see what I'm wearing?"

the agent replied.

“They were enemies and then they ended up being close.

They are the same face of a sport transformed into pure business, ”says a person who dealt with the Juventus manager for years.

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