‘Mino arranges everything’, former professional Mark van Bommel once said in a report of de Volkskrant on the last day of the transfer market. “All you have to do is ask and he’ll take care of it. And by everything I mean everything.’ Raiola was a tough negotiator who was kind to his players who usually belonged, or still belong to the absolute top. A selection: top scorer Haaland, De Ligt, Pogba, Donnarumma, Verratti, De Vrij, Gravenberch, Lozano, Malen, Mazraoui, Dumfries, Stengs, Kluivert, Ibrahimovic and Boadu, and also, for example, trainer Slot van Feyenoord.
It was announced on Saturday that Raiola had died after being hospitalized in Milan months ago, according to himself for routine checkups. On Thursday, he reported pissed that he had been pronounced dead for the second time in four months.
Cartloads criticism
Football made Mino Raiola very rich and that earned him, a resident of Monaco, not only appreciation for his commercial spirit, but also a cartload of criticism. Making millions from one transfer, what was this about? Nearly fifty million to Paul Pogba’s transfer from Juventus to Manchester United. He made the football players and agents far too powerful compared to the clubs, according to criticism. He withdrew millions from football. Raiola always simply put such criticisms aside. That’s how the market was, that’s how the clubs wanted it. They paid all those amounts. And opposite that one big transfer are countless small relocations.
Raiola also had another side, in which he showed that players have too little power. A year ago he sent a message to the undersigned, with slight mockery: ‘We are going to stop the Eredivisie until the Groningen story (about the damage from the earthquakes, ed.) and the benefits story have been resolved to the satisfaction of the victims.’ The message had serious undertones. He felt that the government should not imagine much before these files were completed. He might even have wanted to help. A disgrace, he called it dawdling. His sense of justice was highly developed. He called himself a socialist, which sounded unbelievable for a multimillionaire. Then he would always say, “I want everyone to be rich.”
He also wrote, in the same app: ‘We will no longer play against Russia, not even in the Champions League, until human rights are up to standard there.’ What he really wanted to say: ‘Players don’t have any say in where a World Cup is played, but they are always asked to make a statement. Where is Fifa now?’
Hate Fifa
Raiola hated Fifa. He even wanted to get rid of Fifa altogether, which he called a ‘criminal organization’. He wanted a professional association to regulate football, more or less synonymous with the NBA in American basketball. No corruption, no hassle. For a moment he even considered running for the presidency of the world federation, in order to carry out a total reform from within, but then he would have had to abandon his players. And his players, he did everything for that.
He didn’t ask any players to become his clients. They came to him naturally. Donyell Malen (Borussia Dortmund), for example, as a boy of under 20 years old said: ‘I want the best, I want Mino.’ Football players regularly talk to each other about their agents. Raiola was not good for everyone as some also left him because they wanted a different approach. “I’m never satisfied,” he once said in an interview with de Volkskrant† ‘If I walk away and they have said yes, I think for a moment: they said yes very easily.’
It happened that club and player were happy with an offer, but Raiola wanted it differently. Then it didn’t work. It has happened that, always shabbily dressed in a t-shirt and jeans, he coolly kept executives or even President Berlusconi of Italy waiting. Sometimes they hated him, but after a while they loved him again, because they needed him too. He had the lines, he had the players.
More than a transfer agent
He was also more than a broker of transfers. He thought about club policies. He once advised Zlatan Ibrahimovic to leave AC Milan, in his first period in Lombardy, because the club could no longer pay him. Raiola had already understood that. In the meantime, he had already arranged for the Swede to go to Paris Saint-Germain, which started a new project, with an infinite amount of money from Qatar.
He was also criticized for bringing players abroad too young. Justin Kluivert, for example, who exchanged Ajax for AS Roma and faced a difficult period. Myron Boadu and Calvin Stengs left for Monaco and Nice a year ago. They are having a difficult first year in France.
Italian restaurant in Haarlem
Raiola, born near Naples, moved to the Netherlands as a baby, where his parents started an Italian restaurant in Haarlem. Raiola worked there, mainly as a host, and learned about football when the board of professional club Haarlem met. Later they often called him “pizza baker”. He found that derogatory. ‘As if a pizza chef can’t achieve anything in the football world.’ Besides, he didn’t bake pizzas. In his parents’ home in the center of Haarlem, the Godfather films were prominently displayed on the shelf.
He soon felt that they should take more risks at Haarlem. He was going to do it differently. First employed by real estate agent Rob Jansen, with whom he later became involved, later for himself. Bringing Bryan Roy to Foggia was one of the first transfers he had a part in, partly because he was Italian. Pavel Nedved was his first major customer. So it went on, with bigger and bigger players. In Zlatan Ibrahimovic’s biography ‘Ik Zlatan’, he takes care of the Swedish striker, who is lonely at his apartment in Diemen after he came to Ajax as a teenager.
Raiola is strict and fair. First off that Porsche. First make goals, then spend money. Zlatan and Raiola became inseparable. In his recently published book Adrenaline, Zlatan calls him a father, his best friend.
