The Times - UK (2022-05-02)

42 Monday May 2 2022 | the times

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who showcased his talent in

the tournament was Pavel

Nedved. Raiola, having

left Sports Promo-

tions, was on hand to

broker his move

from Sparta Prague

to Lazio.

Over the next

few years, Raiola

courted young

players and prom-

ised them riches. He

first met the young

Swedish forward Zlatan

Ibrahimovic in a Japanese

sushi restaurant in Amsterdam

in 2001. Raiola told the 20-year-old

Ajax player “sell all your cars and

watches” because he would soon be ac-

quiring much more expensive ones.

Sure enough Ibrahimovic would go on

to seal big-money moves to Juventus,

Inter Milan, Barcelona, AC Milan, PSG

and, inevitably, Manchester United.

Ibrahimovic would portray Raiola as

a sort of mafioso and in recent years the

superagent was investigated by the Ital-

ian football authorities for “irregulari-

ties”. For a long time he evaded punish-

ment and when he was sanctioned he

successfully appealed in 2019. He con-

tinued to live with his family in an

apartment overlooking the harbour in

Monaco; details of his survivors were

not immediately forthcoming although

he is believed to have had an Italian

partner and two sons.

In 2020, he threatened the world

governing body Fifa with legal action

after it unveiled plans to cap agents’

commission on player transfers at

10 per cent.

This summer Raiola had been ex-

pecting to earn a great deal more than

10 per cent in brokering the transfer of

Erling Haaland from Borussia Dort-

mund to Manchester City, a club that

had previously vowed never to do busi-

ness with Raiola because of an incident

years before in which the club’s manag-

er Pep Guardiola nearly came to blows

with the superagent. The deal (if it goes

through) could make the 21-year-old

Norwegian Britain’s first £1 million-a-

week player — 61 years after the maxi-

mum wage of £20 a week in English

football was scrapped. Had he lived, Ra-

iola would have been in line to earn

£47 million in fees and commission

from the Haaland deal. And he would

have been entirely unconcerned at the

negative headlines. “I am not here to be

loved and liked by everybody. I am here

to be loved by my family and by my

players. And the rest, I don’t give a shit.”

Mino Raiola, superagent, was born on

November 4, 1967. He died of lung

disease on April 30, 2022, aged 54

who showc

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Raiola with Zlatan Ibrahimovic in 2018 and the agent unusually well dressed in 1994 as he was making his way in football

When Mino Raiola earned a reported
£41 million for brokering the then
world-record £89 million transfer of
Paul Pogba from Juventus to Manches-
ter United in 2016, some felt it appropri-
ate that the “superagent” was reported
to have spent the proceeds on a house
once owned by Al Capone.
Rapacious agents, accused of manip-
ulating their naive young clients to
move clubs in order to claim lucrative
commissions, were nothing new in
football. Yet in recent years the most
notorious superagent of them all
created a whole new ball game.
Despite being one of the most power-
ful men in football, Raiola took pride in
looking as though he had just attended
a summer frat party: slightly dishev-
elled, he often wore shorts and a
T-shirt, and sported stubble and obliga-
tory sunglasses as he conducted busi-
ness on a mobile phone by a swimming
pool in a sunny clime.
The scruffy, short and pot-bellied
Italian-born Raiola cut a curious figure
next to the athletic young men he rep-
resented. Yet to the footballers, unused
to their sudden riches, he was a Svengali
and a “one-stop shop”. Raiola would ad-
vise them on where to buy a lavish
apartment and which exclusive restau-
rants to dine in. When their customised
Bentley broke down, Raiola would send
a mechanic. When they were arrested
for drunken disorder or faced lurid tab-
loid headlines after a “kiss-and-tell”,
Raiola would act as consigliere.
Mario Balotelli, whose transfer from
Inter Milan to Manchester City Raiola
had negotiated in 2010, once set fire to
his house during a prank at a party that
went badly wrong. The panic-stricken
Italian called Raiola who calmly told
him to call the fire brigade.
In the case of Pogba, Raiola had first
incurred the wrath of Manchester
United’s then manager Sir Alex Fergus-
on in 2012. “Fergie” had been quietly
nurturing the 19-year-old Frenchman
when Raiola blew his cover and de-
manded that Pogba be paid a vastly im-
proved contract in the face of interest in
the player from Juventus. Unfazed by
the celebrated Scottish manager who
knew how to be intimidating when he
needed to be, Raiola had the temerity to
tell Ferguson that “my chihuahuas
wouldn’t sign” the contract that United
were offering. Ferguson called Raiola a
“t***” and refused to agree to the new
terms. Inside, though, the Manchester
United manager was seething with rage
because he knew that the player’s head
had been turned. Pogba moved to Ju-
ventus that summer and Raiola made a
hefty commission.
“I distrusted him from the moment I
met him,” said Ferguson, who was
already well used to dealing with agents

but had yet to deal with one as abrasive

as Raiola, who had a reputation for

throwing chairs to make his point. “Rai-

ola suddenly appeared on the scene and

our first meeting was a fiasco. From

then on our goose was cooked.”

Four years later, with Ferguson

having retired, Pogba returned to Man-

chester United with Raiola claiming that

his client would “dominate for ten years.

He is United’s lost son.” This summer

Pogba is expected to leave Old Trafford

after six ultimately disappointing years

marked by fallings-out with managers,

injuries and long absences from the

team. Raiola was expected to profit

handsomely from a deal with Real Ma-

drid or Paris Saint-Germain.

More hard-headed observers

claimed that Raiola was cleverly fulfill-

ing a need. He was obsessed with foot-

ball, using his knowledge of the game,

and contacts within it, to identify future

superstars. Second, he was a brilliant

linguist who could negotiate with a hu-

morous patter in English, Italian, Ger-

man, Spanish, French, Portuguese and

Dutch — languages spoken by all the

great footballing nations. Third, he was

a workaholic who operated as a one-

man band apart from using the services

of his Brazilian lawyer. Finally, he had

business pedigree before becoming a

father who could not speak Dutch. At

the same time he was playing in the

youth team of Haarlem FC. At 18 he had

stopped playing football and was man-

aging Haarlem’s youth team. Mean-

while, he studied law for two years and

was appointed sporting director at

Haarlem after he told the club’s chair-

man (rather in the manner of Brian

Clough) that he knew nothing about

football. He hatched a plan to sign a

young player called Dennis Bergkamp,

but his brash manner made him

enemies in the Haarlem boardroom

and he left the club.

He began assisting the Dutch foot-

ball agent Rob Jansen, acting as an in-

terpreter when Bergkamp was trans-

ferred from Ajax to Inter Milan in 1993.

While working for Jansen’s agency

Sports Promotions he built up his own

client list of Dutch players and devel-

oped an approach that took being a

father figure to new heights. After nego-

tiating the transfer of Brian Roy from

Ajax to Foggia, he stayed in the southern

Italian city for six months to help Roy

settle in and even painted his house.

During Euro ’96 England were ago-

nisingly knocked out in the semi-final

on penalties by Germany, who would

meet the little fancied Czech Republic

in the final. One of the Czech players

football agent, having made his first

million at the age of 19 when he bought

and sold a McDonald’s franchise in the

Netherlands. Raiola may have been un-

scrupulous and even greedy, but many

claimed that the real folly lay with the

big clubs, especially in England, who

Raiola had shaken money out of so

adeptly for so long. Raiola told the Fi-

nancial Times: “It’s a closed world with

gigantic potential and a huge turnover

of money, but often managed by people

of whom I think ‘what the f***?’ ”

Carmine Raiola was born in 1967 in

Nocera Inferiore, Salerno, southern

Italy. His father was a mechanic but

when Mino was a baby the family

moved to Haarlem in the Netherlands,

where his parents first opened a sand-

wich shop, then a pizzeria and finally an

upmarket restaurant.

From the age of 11 Mino was working

as a waiter in the restaurant so that he

could “get to know my dad”, who often

worked 20-hour days. By 16 he was ne-

gotiating with banks on behalf of his

He told Alex Ferguson

‘my chihuahuas wouldn’t

sign’ United’s offer

Mino Raiola

Notorious superagent who pocketed hundreds of millions of pounds from brokering transfer deals of the world’s best footballers

GETTY IMAGES

Lives remembered

Bernard Jackson

writes: Colin Sem-

per (obituary, April

23) gave me my first

job as a researcher

at the BBC back in

the early Seventies

In his 1991 review, Carey had written

“Barker is, one gathers, still alive.. .”

Sadly, by the time the review was pub-

lished, what Carey “gathered” was no

longer true. Barker died on October 27,

the day it came out. A gossip columnist,

noting the coincidence, floated the pos-

sibility that Barker was reading the re-

view that morning, and that it had effec-

tively killed him.

The family’s retribution followed

soon. At the 1991 Sunday Times Books

Christmas party, Carey was in mid-con-

versation when he spotted “a winged fu-

ry” bearing down on him. It was Elspeth

and one of her children. He hastened to

escape but found a large table barring his

way. Elspeth came up and hissed “Be

wary, Carey” in his face before vanish-

ing. The poetry world — it’s not all slim

volumes and glasses of sherry.

Nigel Williamson writes: I knew Elspeth

Barker — she and Barbara Trapido

were the tutors on an Arvon novel-

writing course at Lumb Bank I went on.

We kept in touch and the obit captured

her free spirit. It’s true that she liked a

glass or two of wine in the evening but

she was not drinking until 4am and had

gone to bed by midnight. It was me who

stayed up drinking until 4am. The place

had a cellar with an honesty book and at

the end of the week there were half a

dozen bottles unaccounted for. I fear

several of them were down to me — in

the inebriated haze of getting one last

bottle at 3am, I may not have been total-

ly punctilious in entering it in the book.

She was very different from Barbara

Trapido. After all the group sessions, we

had one afternoon “off” when we were

meant to work “solo” on a writing

when he was the producer of Speakeasy,

the Radio 1 show hosted by Jimmy

Savile. Colin was a kind and generous

man, full of good humour and a fertile

imagination for programme ideas. Like

lots of others we enjoyed being asso-

ciated with the celebrity which sur-

rounded Savile, but at no point did any

of us suspect there was a much darker

side to the man, because such matters

were never discussed, and in any event

cunning concealment is the mark of

those who do harm. Colin, fooled by

Savile like the rest of us, once did re-

mark that “the BBC makes its own

monsters”. Perhaps an inkling, but no

evidence at that time.

If you would like to add a personal view or

recollection to a published obituary, you

can email it to [email protected]

@

Elspeth Barker

John Walsh writes:
Your obituary of El-
speth Barker (April
27) reminds me of
the occasion, in Oc-
tober 1991, when
The Sunday Times
reviewed a bio-
graphy of Elizabeth
Smart, the American author. The re-
view, by John Carey, was critical of Ms
Smart but positively damning about
her on-off lover George Barker: he was,
said Carey, “a minor poet who enjoyed
some vogue in the 1930s”. Much later,
Barker had married Elspeth (née Lang-
lands) and from the late 1960s they
lived together in Norfolk, raising five
children.

The Very Rev Colin Semper

assignment. Instead I persuaded a fe-

male student on the course to accompa-

ny me to the Brontë museum at How-

arth, which was a 15-mile drive away.

The next morning, Trapido was very

censorious when we didn’t hand in our

homework and gave us a lecture about

what was the point of coming on the

course if we were going to truant etc. El-

speth just said “bloody good idea”.