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 in 2021.
“I’m here to be loved by my family and by my players. The rest? I don’t give a ****.”
At the end of April, the 54-year-old died after a long illness. This, then,
is the story of a life that ended too soon, but which was remarkable all the same.
Born in Nocera Inferiore, south east of Naples, and described with his own
self-deprecating humour as “the ugliest baby ever seen”, he was raised in nearby Angri.
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. That’s a myth. 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. 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.
Zlatan 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 I Am Zlatan Ibrahimovic. “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 and 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.
Little did they know that the guy topping up their wine glasses would become one of the biggest
movers and shakers the game would ever see. After buying a McDonald’s franchise and
flipping it for a profit, Raiola formed a company called Intermezzo and entered the transfer market.
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.”
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’.
Raiola moved out to Puglia with Roy and would drive him to and from training. “Mino painted
the walls of my house,” the player recalled. “He doesn’t like it when I remind him of that now.”
On the back of that deal, Raiola would become the architect of Dennis Bergkamp
and Wim Jonk making the double switch to Inter from Ajax a year later. In 1996,
he would bring Pavel Nedved from Sparta Prague to Lazio.
Arguably, though, no foreign import to Serie A this century had more
impact than another Raiola client: Ibrahimovic.
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 •••• himself.”
It was a language he understood and respected. 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?”
But style never mattered to him. Substance did.
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.
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 that became a multi-billion industry.
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.
And 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.