Monaco is a city of hills, slopes, stairs and elevators. It is possible to enter a building, take the elevator up and still be underground. Only the people who live there find their way without hesitation. Those who really know Monaco never have to take a flight of stairs – they know the route through the maze.
The architecture of the city is the first thing Mino Raiola talked about last December, when NRC visited him one morning. The sea, he said, is there — and he pointed. You can be there in a minute, but only if you know the way to the nearest lift. Otherwise you are endlessly on the road.
Mino Raiola’s phone rang incessantly during those hours in his office. There was hardly a moment in his life when his cell phone didn’t ring. Different ringtones, for different types of callers. It could be Zlatan Ibrahimovic (AC Milan), Erling Haaland (Borussia Dortmund), Matthijs de Ligt (Juventus), Paul Pogba (Manchester United), Ryan Gravenberch (Ajax). Directors of Barcelona, Juventus or Manchester United. Here sat a man who had made himself indispensable to the biggest football clubs. If you didn’t know him, you didn’t get the players you wanted.
And those players, his players, were everything to him. Persuasion, brutal boldness, inimitable metaphors, exaggeration, name-calling – he did everything he could to get the best out of a contract deal, often making many millions himself – sometimes on a single transfer. That made him hated, there were people who thought he was a parasite. But his players, they loved him. And that mattered to him.
Contrary to what people often think, the deals he made were not based on theater and bluff. They were instruments, but in Monaco Raiola explained that it was not the basis. That was the fact that he could put himself in the shoes of his negotiating partner. In his industry, Raiola said, you have to deeply understand football clubs and their directors. How the club is financially, the internal politics, interests of trainers, lines that run with other agents.
It is, Raiola said, just like the city he lived in. You must know the way. Otherwise you will achieve nothing. He had grown up by always knowing more than others. “If you know how the system works, you can push boundaries,” he said.
On Saturday it was announced via his Twitter account that Mino Raiola had died at the age of 54, the players’ agent who sold himself until his last day as the son of a pizza baker from Haarlem. He was a man who profoundly changed the football world, along with an elite club of other players’ agents. Without him, agents would not have been able to make millions from transfers and footballers might not have been the artists they are now held for, people who are sometimes traded for more than a hundred million euros.
Also read: the interview that NRC had in December 2021 with Mino Raiola in Monaco. “I never claimed to be cheap.”
Restaurant Napoli
Carmine ‘Mino’ Raiola was born in Italy (Nocera Inferiore, 1967), but left for the Netherlands when he was one year old. There his father opened pizza restaurant Napoli on the Grote Markt in Haarlem. It became the place where the life of the Raiolas revolved. His father always worked. Eighteen, twenty hours a day. As a boy of twelve, Mino saw only one opportunity to see his father more often: he also started working in the restaurant. There he served customers and talked to them. He would later look back on it as the school that taught him everything. How do you see if a customer feels comfortable? How you deal with people. How to sell that expensive bottle of wine instead of the house wine.
Once, when he wanted to evict a somewhat ragged-looking man from the restaurant – it was just before opening time – his father got angry. At Napoli, everyone was treated with respect. The appearance of the customer turned out to be misleading. He spent hundreds of guilders on a lavish lunch. You see, his father nodded, and Mino understood.
Young Raiola also started his first business in the restaurant. He mediated between Dutch businessmen – customers from the restaurant – and Italian suppliers. Flower bulb traders, tissue growers, seed exporters. His company was called Intermezzo. When he bought a local McDonald’s branch and sold the land back to a real estate entrepreneur, Mino Raiola became a millionaire.
Raiola had made itself exclusive, an indispensable radar in the gears of top football
He played football next door. Through contacts he ended up at HFC Haarlem (now defunct), where he was briefly technical director. In 1992 he helped a player to a new club for the first time. Bryan Roy left Ajax for Foggia in Italy and Mino Raiola went with him. Literally, because Raiola not only did the contract negotiations, but also helped furnish and paint Roy’s new house. It would become his trademark: the total guidance of players. Italian footballer Mario Balotelli, a well-known enfant terribleRaiola once called because there was a fire in his house. He hadn’t thought of calling the fire brigade first.
The big breakthrough came with the transfer of Pavel Nedved. Raiola discovered the Czech at Sparta Prague and persuaded him to come to Lazio in Rome in 1996, where he knew trainer Zdenek Zeman well. Nedved became one of the best midfielders in the world and Raiola’s name was established. It wasn’t long before major players opted for Raiola’s luxurious one-on-one coaching. He gave them good contracts, but also security: footballers had become world stars, with little privacy and a lot of money. Increasingly, they wanted someone who would take their whole life off their hands – Raiola quickly understood that.
Seeing through the football
“In Italy they say: you cannot worship God and the devil. You have to make a choice. It has always been clear to me: I do it for my players. My relationship with them is sincere, which fake not me. That’s why I’ve had top players under my wing for twenty-five years,” Raiola said during the conversation in Monaco.
And yes, sometimes it failed. Mario Balotelli threw his career away at several clubs by misbehaving. Mohammed Ihattaren (now Jong Ajax) left Raiola after he was more or less sent away from PSV and ended up in a valley. “If something like that happens,” said Raiola, “it’s my fault. Ihattaren apparently didn’t feel good about me anymore. I was not able to convey that I wanted the best for him.”
More often Mino Raiola saw it well. He transferred Zlatan Ibrahimovic from Ajax to Juventus. Just before Juventus got into trouble due to a corruption scandal, he transferred him to Internazionale. When Ibrahimovic played for AC Milan a few years later (he played for FC Barcelona in between), Raiola foresaw that the club would run into financial problems. He also saw that the big money could now be made in Paris, where Paris Saint-Germain had been taken over by an investment fund from Qatar. So Zlatan went there. As the striker grew older and the United States emerged as a football nation, Raiola flew to Los Angeles to secure a contract with LA Galaxy. Seeing through the football world and being ahead of developments – that’s how it worked in practice.
Private planes
He worked hard for it. Mino Raiola was always traveling and hardly saw his children. He lived in Monaco because of the favorable tax rules, but also because it is centrally located. Within a few hours he could be anywhere in Europe. In recent years, this has been done with private planes. He didn’t want that before — he kept the kid out of the pizza place. Why pay 30,000 euros when a ticket to Amsterdam is also possible for 300 euros? He often wore worn-out sweaters—partly so people would underestimate him—and never saw himself as rich. But he was.
The outside world saw nothing more than that wealth. Especially after out Football Leaksdocuments had revealed that Raiola received 48 million euros in the transfer of Frenchman Paul Pogba (for 105 million euros) to Manchester United in 2016. That was the moment that the general public realized what big bites the agents are taking from the football cake. Investigations were launched into Raiola – who, incidentally, always denied the amount, but also refused to talk about it – but nothing ever came of it.
Big players, who knew little about privacy, also chose Raiola’s one-on-one coaching because it offered them safety
Raiola knew that a club like Manchester United makes hundreds of millions these days from television contracts and merchandising. He felt that the players on the field brought in that money for the club. It was normal for him that they were paid royally for this. He thought it was part and parcel of the fact that he himself, who was not on the field, also received so much money. Anyone who complained about it was “jealous”.
Partly because of him, players have become accustomed to doing nothing without an agent. It is therefore also true that the agent has become a gatekeeper for access to luxury footballers – Raiola has made itself exclusive, a must-have radar in the gears of top football.
uncompromising
It was an example that was soon followed by other agents. Last year about 450 million euros went to agents. All money that is leaking out of football, while ticket prices for ordinary people continue to rise. World football association FIFA considers that “misuse” of money and “excessive”, but Raiola did not see the problem.
In the Pogba transfer, he had simply done something that suited him: going to the extreme. uncompromisingly. And what a club wanted to pay for a player, and for his services, that club had to know for itself. “I’ve never sat at a negotiating table with a pistol and machine gun to say, ‘Now you’re going to pay me what you don’t have,” Raiola said in his office.
He was surrounded there in Monaco by newspaper clippings about himself. Because yes, Mino Raiola was famous. Everything – literally everything – he said about a player was newsworthy. He only had to mention that Matthijs de Ligt might want to leave Juventus and it was on the front pages of sports newspapers in Italy, England, Germany and the Netherlands. Whenever Raiola went anywhere, fans would cheer him on, hoping he would bring a great player to their club.
His greatness was perhaps also apparent from the fact that his death was reported twice in the past year. Italian media reported the “news”, after which it quickly spread around the world. Both times Raiola had to debunk it herself. After the football world thought he had passed away in April, he tweeted: “Current health status for anyone wondering: I am disgusted that they are trying to kill me for the second time in four months.”
The messages were not completely out of the blue. Raiola had been ill for a long time, although he hid from the outside world what was going on. He always remained a man with big plans, and it had to stay that way.
He also had so much to do. The transfer system had to be overthrown, he thought. Smaller clubs should earn more from transfers than larger ones. As a result, there would be fewer elite clubs that could buy the best players and more excitement in football. He was willing to abolish transfer fees altogether, although he earned gold from the percentages he negotiated for transfers. He would earn money in a different way, he wasn’t afraid of that.
He also fought against FIFA and its attempts to break the power of brokers. And FIFA wanted to compete with him. Well, he said, whoever wants to fight Raiola must bare their fists. When he spoke about it in Monaco, he sometimes literally smacked the palm of his hand with his firm fist.
He was preparing lawsuits against FIFA for a large group of players’ agents. He wanted to rush the union, put it on display, marginalize it. He was, he thought, the only one who could succeed. He, Mino Raiola, who still kept his business small and was assisted by some close relatives. Because being small doesn’t mean thinking small. “We’re going to win,” he said, “because the good ones always win.”