It's not easy to describe Mino Raiola in full. He was the most influential soccer agent in the world. Every single person involved in the industry knew who he was. He was unique but he had a totally different approach to the way he worked for his players. Raiola died Saturday at age 54 after being hospitalized following a long battle with illness.
Where other agents worked behind the scenes, Raiola was out front, giving interviews, working in public. The big contracts and bigger transfer fees he negotiated meant that while he might not have been liked much by soccer fans around the world, you'd have to look long and hard to find players that were not satisfied with the way he worked with them. His job was to make his players the best and possibly the richest as well. The players knew that and felt protected.
There is one episode that explains who Mino Raiola was and why he was so good at his job. Zlatan Ibrahimovic relates it in his first book, I am Zlatan Ibrahimovic. The first time Raiola met the star striker, who became the player that was probably closest one to him, he completely changed Ibrahimovic's life. The Swede was playing for Ajax and he asked a journalist friend for some advice in helping him find a new agent. The journalist came back with a few options. There were two in particular, one was one of the most important agencies around the globe, the other one was Mino Raiola.
"Trust me, you will like this guy, he's like you", he told Ibrahimovic. Zlatan agreed to meet Raiola in Amsterdam in a restaurant and arrived at the meeting with his brand new car and dressed up elegantly. He waited quite a bit and some minutes later Mino Raiola arrived at the meeting with a Hawaiian shirt, some shorts and sneakers. Ibrahimovic was speechless. Raiola ordered sushi for seven people while there were only three at the table. "Don't worry Zlatan", Mino said after that Ibrahimovic asked him who was going to eat that amount of food. Then the meeting entered the key phase. Raiola came with some stats on a piece of paper with the numbers of strikers like Christian Vieri, Andriy Shevchenko, Pippo Inzaghi and others, and said, "They score a lot of goals. You scored four in 21 matches. It's impossible to do a transfer with these numbers."
Ibrahimovic, according to his telling, answered right away. "With the numbers of those strikers even my mom can sell me, that's why I need you." Raiola laughed, and that day began one of the most incredible relationships in the history of soccer between an agents player. Ibrahimovic was one of the last people to visit him at the hospital before he died on Saturday.
Raiola was unique. He started from nothing in the Netherlands, where his family had immigrated to from Italy a year after his birth in 1967, and he was a self-made man. He played as a footballer but then decided to create an agency for intermediaries in soccer. He worked mainly as an intermediary between the Netherlands and Italy in the 1990's and took advantage of his language skills to strike some notable deals including Dennis Bergkamp's move to Inter Milan from Ajax. Raiola, in fact, could speak Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, French, English and German. He was fluent in all of them, a factor which helped spur his meteoric rise to representing some of the biggest names in the soccer world.
In many ways, he invented a new way to be a soccer agent. He worked with very few players, only ones at the world class level, and he, often controversially, put himself at the center of the stage. He would be a defender of his players in public, a man who would happily put himself up for abuse by fans as a public figure, but that was him doing the job he was asked to do by his players.
He was the agent of many megawatt stars. Not only Zlatan Ibrahimovic, but Paul Pogba, Erling Haaland, Mario Balotelli, Matthijs de Ligt, Gianluigi Donnarumma and many others. Through the years he also fought to change FIFA regulations and had aggressive ideas about what the future of soccer should look like. "I think the transfer window should be open the whole year or only two weeks," he said once to Sky Italia. "The January one is useless, while in the summer everything should be done in the first two weeks of July"
Raiola was one of the most incredible and uncommon figures in the soccer world and sadly he won't get to see some of his players moving this summer, including Haaland who is expected to be one of the most awaited transfers of the recent history. His legacy will continue, because the impact he has left on "his" players will never go away. There was only one Raiola. For his style, for his interviews, for his way of working, he was unique and nobody can even attempt to emulate his presence. This is who Mino Raiola was, the best soccer agent in the world. Love him or hate him, the soccer world won't be the same without him.