From Pizza chef to football’s most powerful agent
LONDON. the life.
— Mino Raiola lived quite
The super-agent, who passed away on Saturday aged 54, was undoubtedly one of the best-known figures in football, despite never playing the sport professionally himself. As the agent of Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Mario Balotelli, Paul Pogba, Erling Haaland and many others, he was constantly under the spotlight.
He was outspoken, hard-working, controversial and unavoidable in football. Having spent 28 years in the game, Raiola has been absolutely instrumental in shaping the football world we know today, for better or worse.
Raiola reached the very top of his profession as a football agent, but he was by no means destined for greatness.
His back-story, of which he was very proud, is remarkable and formed the backbone of his work ethic and moral code.
Born in Italy, Raiola and his extended family moved from Salerno, in the south of the country, to Haarlem in the Netherlands in 1968. They may have moved across Europe, but the Raiolas maintained their links with the home country by opening a pizzeria called, appropriately enough, Napoli, in Haarlem’s big market square.
It was there that the young Mino learned a lot about life.
Raiola worked odd jobs in the family restaurant, waiting tables and washing up, while he watched his father pour his heart and soul into the business.
“My dad worked 18, sometimes 20 hours a day here,” Raiola told The Financial Times in 2016.
“At work he is extreme. When I was 11 or 12, I went to work with my dad to get to know him. He was in the kitchen, so what could I do? I could wash up.”
With a taste for it, Raiola expanded. He founded a company called Intermezzo, which helped Dutch companies do business in Italy. By the age of just 19 he was a millionaire, having bought a branch of McDonald’s and sold it to a property developer. Raiola started and then dropped out of a law degree, because he wanted to pursue his real passion: football.
He ended up becoming the technical director of local club FC Haarlem, where he orchestrated an ambitious move for none other than Dennis Bergkamp.
It didn’t work, but that didn’t stop Raiola moving up. The boom in Serie A after Italia 90 came at a good time, allowing his company, Intermezzo, to move into football.
His big break came in 1992 when Intermezzo helped Dutch winger Bryan Roy move from Ajax to Italian side Foggia.
Sensing an opportunity, Raiola moved to Italy with Roy and began making contacts in the country’s football scene. He got to know Luciano Moggi, an important football executive, and really made an impact in 1996 by overseeing Pavel Nedved’s move to Lazio from Sparta Prague.
Raiola’s work ethic, language skills and determination saw him gradually climb the ladder. He had an eye for a good player, backed the right horses and knew which way the wind was blowing.
As he put it to The Financial Times: “It sounds arrogant. I saw every change in the football world coming before it happened.”
Raiola was not afraid to ruffle feathers. He developed a very unique method of negotiation, which made him popular with his clients he regarded 99 per cent of them as friends and occasionally extremely unpopular with managers and club executives. He crossed swords with Pep Guardiola, but his most famous disagreement came with Sir Alex Ferguson.
Raiola identified Pogba’s talent early and became his agent while he was still developing in the Manchester United academy.
He soon engineered a move for Pogba to Juventus much to Ferguson’s annoyance. Asked years later why he had allowed Pogba to leave the club for Juve in 2012, Ferguson replied: “Pogba?