The style according to Mino Raiola Being and appearance of the most famous football agent of the past twenty years

Perhaps it's because Zlatan Ibrahimovic has just come back to Serie A, and also because we are about to enter into the heart of the winter transfer market, but it's that time of the year when we constantly hear the name of Mino Raiola when they talk about great players about to move from their club. Pavel Nedved, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Mario Balotelli, Paul Pogba, Romelu Lukaku, Gianluigi Donnarumma have all in common the Italian agent, for over a decade the undisputed protagonist of the market sessions, and together with Jorge Mendes is undoubtedly the sports agent who has closed the most important negotiations in recent years. Without going deeply into their earnings, Raiola and Mendes do not seem to do the same job: the artificial and almost always perfect look of the Portuguese businessman is in fact opposed by Mino's style, anonymous and apparently scruffy but at the same time natural, a bit like his very direct and unscrupulous behviors that made him the king of the football deals. 

Thanks to the mediator skills which has always been by nature, since the time of the management of the family restaurant in Haarlem where he worked as a waiter (and not as a pizza chef!) or the Mc Donald's restaurant purchased and resold after a few months at the age of 19 years, Raiola has managed to take care of the interests of many 'complicated' characters such as Mario Balotelli, but also of knowing how to deal with professional and experienced executives. With some he reached to establish long-lasting relationships and to close rich deals, but with others the feeling never born because of his somewhat gruff ways. As with Alex Ferguson for example: the Scottish manager to whom he 'stole' a young Pogba from the Academy called him 'shit bag', and then a few years later, referring to their relationship, he used a metaphor as unusual as inappropriate: 'he and I are like water and oil'. But the truth, unlike what one might believe, it were not money that moved his millionaire operations, but human parables. This is what emerges from an excerpt of a rare and significant interview with GQ:

"I ask the players: 'Do you want to become the highest paid or the best?' If they answer 'the highest paid' I point out the door. The painter who paints a picture for money and not for passion does not sell it. Money is very important, but if you chase it it will never come and in time you end up understanding that there is always someone richer than you."

But more than that of having managed to obtain the maximum possible profit from his clients, his great merit, however, is perhaps that of having contributed to the spectacularization of his category, to the definitive consecration of the agent capable of dictating the rules of business, facing alone the leaders of the most prestigious teams. If before its natural habitat was Holland, from which it started its activity thanks to the agreement from Dennis Bergkamp and Inter Milan, now it has no more established borders and moves on the International market like a vulture to arrive before the others on talented players. And in the meantime, he continues to be talked about for extra events, but simply because his statements are often anti-rhetoric, like when he was furious live on Sky because the internet didn't work. After recent legal troubles, and the gossip of buying the Al Capone villa in Miami, he's now grappling with the renovation of his team, looking for the new youngsters with which to make maxi commissions: after Moise Kean, Matthijs de Ligt and Erling Haaland, the names of the future could be those of Xavi Simons and then who knows, even that of one of the best Premier League forward, Marcus Rashford. Then, perhaps, he will finally manage to buy his own team as he had repeatedly declared in the past.