The famous Italian-Dutch businessman Mino Raiola, agent of the most prominent football players in the world, led by Swede Zlatan Ibrahimovic, French Paul Pogba and Norwegian Erling Haaland, died Saturday at the age of 54, his family announced on Twitter.
“It is with immense sadness that we announce the passing of the most kind and wonderful player agent ever,” the family said.
“Mino fought to the end with the same strength he was at the negotiating table to defend our players… Mino’s mission to make football a better place for players will continue with the same passion.”
Raiola is known to have been shrewd in securing the best offers for his players and at the same time getting his highest wages through these deals. Perhaps the most prominent of them is an amount of 49 million euros that he obtained in exchange for Pogba’s transfer to Manchester United in 2016, which amounted to about 100 million euros, while club presidents feared him because he was a high-level negotiator and often imposed his conditions on them.
Raiola was born in 1967 in Italy, but grew up in the Netherlands, specifically in Haarlem, where his family moved when he was one year old.
He worked in his family’s restaurant when he was young, but later became an official in a club in the early nineties. Then he began to be interested in the process of transferring players from the Netherlands to Italy, specifically the transfer of Dennis Bergkamp from Ajax Amsterdam to Inter in 1993.
Raiola’s first big deal, who speaks seven languages, was the transfer of Czech midfielder Pavel Nedved to Italy’s Lazio in 1996.
Soon, his company grew successively and included prominent names such as Ibrahimovic (a close friend), Pogba, Italian Mario Balotelli, Dutch Matisse de Ligt, his compatriots Marco Verratti, Gianluigi Donnarumma and Halland.
Raiola had announced on January 12 that he had passed “medical tests that require anesthesia,” adding that “other tests are scheduled, and not an urgent surgery.”
His death comes two days after the Italian media announced his departure, before he and his representatives and the director of the intensive care unit at San Raffaele Hospital near Milan denied this.
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