He had continued to do what he wanted and knew how to do wonderfully, the football player’s agent who also knows how to disguise himself as an auctioneer and as a seller of more or less valuable objects, right up to the end. A few days before the last (and unfortunately fatal) hospitalization, Carmine Raiola, for friends and enemies Mino, had directed the traffic of bids and counter-offers on the upside between Manchester City and Real Madrid for Haaland, next summer’s prized piece of the market. Destiny has taken away from him the possibility of personally managing the transfer of the Norwegian goal machine, the latest addition to a team made up of many champions and as many medium-sized players who have lived in the reflected light of their agent, from Borussia Dortmund to a big name in continental football. Probably, before leaving at the age of 54, he will have had time to set the grand finale of the blond Viking soap opera: one of the many interpreted by the absolute leading actor and also as director, by those who managed to ferry, manage, discover and enrich horses purebred such as Pogba, Ibrahimovic, Donnarumma, Balotelli, Mkhitaryan and De Ligt. Market star attorney, so much so that he closed business in 2020 worth 848 million dollars with certified commissions for 85, but of humble origins: born in Angri, in the province of Salerno, emigrated to Haarlem in the Netherlands and a resident of Montecarlo for some years. Rich, very rich at the time of his death, after starting his incredible rise from the family pizzeria. Always attentive to the substance, regardless of the shape: in dressing, often and willingly in Bermuda shorts, as well as in dealing, almost always able to get to checkers.
Mino Raiola: the rise, the most famous phrases and the samples discovered by the prosecutor from Pogba to Ibra
Among the tables of the family restaurant, the young Mino refined his particular sign: the incredible ability to understand the tastes of the people in front of him. Between the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, thanks to an agreement with the players’ union, he became the representative of the Dutch abroad: Rijkaard at Milan, Roy at Foggia, Bergkamp and Jonk at Inter. who see him involved in some way with his first company, Intermezzo. Precursor of a change of mentality that has changed the laws of the transfer market. “The old prosecutors were in the interests of the clubs, for me the player comes first”, his personal Gospel welcomed by many clients who later rediscovered themselves as millionaires. His masterpieces were Nedved, Ibrahimovic, Pogba and Donnarumma, shaped, bred and never abandoned. Balotelli, another of his loyal customers, the most moved pawn of him. “For me all my players are important”, the scream on live television to complain about the slow internet connection in the Milanese hotel of the transfer market that had caused Kasami to skip the transfer to breaking latest news. Cross and delight of companies, the press and fellow prosecutors: friend and foe depending on the situation. Everyone will miss him: as it was impossible to imagine two World Cups without Italy, it will seem unreal to conceive a transfer market without Mino Raiola.