Meet Pimenta: Heiress to Raiola’s empire, most powerful lady in football

On April 30 this year, arguably the world’s most famous football agent passed away.

At the age of 54, the Italian broker Mino Raiola died at San Raffaele hospital in Milan after suffering from a serious illness since January. On social media, a catalogue of star names paid tribute.

Alfie Haaland, the father of now-Manchester City striker Erling Haaland, wrote: “R.I.P. The Best.”

Roma’s former Manchester United and Arsenal midfielder Henrikh Mkhitaryan posted to say: “I will miss you My Agent, My Best Friend, My Family. You will be with us forever.”

The French World Cup winner Paul Pogba, also represented by Raiola, posted a tribute video and said: “Always in my heart, thank you Mimi”, followed by a love heart emoji. Raiola, of course, was the man who steered Pogba to leave Manchester United for Juventus on a free transfer as a teenager in 2012 and then brokered the Frenchman’s return to Old Trafford from the Italian club for a then-world-record £89.3 million transfer fee four years later.

That deal alone was alleged to have been a worth a staggering a £41.39 million to Raiola, as a result of a clause he inserted into Pogba’s agreement to join Juventus when the Turin side agreed to pay him a 50 per cent cut of any future excess of a sale worth more than £40 million.

This, combined with agent fees from United and commissions from Pogba himself, drove up his earnings from the transfer, according to the book Football Leaks: The Dirty Business Of Football, published by Rafael Buschmann and Michael Wulzinger in 2017. Raiola later denied that these figures were correct.

Raiola’s hefty commissions, combined with his sharp tongue, combined to make him one of the most notorious characters in the sport.

His client list, by the end, was quite extraordinary. Haaland, Pogba and Mkhitaryan formed part of a vast and high-quality stable that also included Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Blaise Matuidi, Marco Verratti, Gianluigi Donnarumma, Mario Balotelli, Moise Kean, Alphonse Areola, Alessio Romagnoli, Adnan Januzaj and Noussair Mazraoui.

He had additionally become the most prolific gatherer of young talent in the Netherlands, where he registered players to his agency including Matthijs de Ligt, Justin Kluivert, Ryan Gravenberch, Owen Wijndal, Denzel Dumfries, Donyell Malen, Calvin Stengs and Myron Boadu.

This cohort of players are all aged 23 or below, with the exception of the 26-year-old Dumfries, who is currently at Inter Milan but drawing interest from elsewhere.

When Raiola died, therefore, there was no shortage of distant observers who wondered how this may affect what many outsiders considered to be a one-man operation and whether an exodus of talent may be around the corner.

One agent, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told The Athletic that while there would be a “period of respect that even the worst agents would honour”, there would eventually be an “awkward conversation in every boardroom” about whether discreet enquiries should be made to try to poach Raiola’s clients.

For now, however, there have been next to no movements, beyond the departure of Marcus Thuram, the son of the former Juventus defender Lilian Thuram, who left the agency shortly before Raiola passed away.

This is partly because players tend to sign management contracts with agencies that run for several years, but the principal reason is a woman named Rafaela Pimenta.

In the words of one Premier League recruitment lead, Pimenta is “the most important football person nobody knows about” while another source in the agent world described her as “the most powerful woman in football now”. In Pogba’s new documentary (sorry, Pogmentary), he describes her to his children as “Auntie Rafa”, but the aforementioned agent also warned she is the “toughest negotiator in football”, ranking her alongside the Israeli intermediary Pini Zahavi.

Pimenta, a Brazilian lawyer, worked alongside Raiola for over 20 years and is now running the empire.

Raiola does have two sons, Mario and Gabriele, but the lead management of the agency, called One and based in the principality of Monaco, has been entrusted to Pimenta.

Considering the outspoken and public nature of Raiola, it may be a surprise to some to learn that for the past 18 years, Pimenta has been a partner at the agency and, according to several sources, involved at key stages in every deal for their clients.

She was the person who would run through the paperwork with a fine-tooth comb but was also close to players and their families, and involved in strategic decision-making. Pimenta is also the executive vice-president of The Football Forum (Raiola was the president, with his fellow super-agent Jorge Mendes the vice-president) — a movement of agents and players who appeared to counter attempts by FIFA, the sport’s worldwide governing body, to limit agent fees and also respond to attempts by domestic leagues to impose salary caps.

Yet when a pair of Italian authors, Giovanni Chianelli and Angelo Pisani, wrote a biography of Raiola previously, they made no mention of Pimenta. It is only since Raiola’s death that she has been thrust into the public limelight, with her name appearing more often in media reports in Italy, where she has been described as the “heiress”.

She has certainly had a busy start to the post-Raiola era. It was Pimenta who negotiated the finer details of Haaland’s £51.2 million transfer from Borussia Dortmund to City and she is the key contact for Juventus as they seek to finalise the free-transfer return of Pogba following the expiry of his contract at United.

As Raiola’s health deteriorated this spring, Pimenta became the point of contact for City executives on phone calls and emails concerning the Haaland move, and she flew in for essential meetings to conclude the deal.

In the latter stages of the transfer, Raiola passed away, but this followed previous false speculation that he had died several days earlier (after rumours of his death a couple of months before) which quickly spread on social media. This led to a tweet from Raiola’s Twitter account that read: “Current health status for the ones wondering: pissed off second time in 4 months they kill me. Seem also able to resuscitate.” Two days later, he did die, and Pimenta personally rang around One’s stable of clients to ensure they heard the news directly from her, rather than from media reports.

In recent weeks, she has also overseen the transfers of two Ajax players to Bayern Munich — the full-back Mazraoui, 24, on a free transfer and 20-year-old midfielder Gravenberch in a transfer worth an initial £16 million, potentially rising to £20 million if certain add-ons are triggered. In the case of Gravenberch’s move, talks were active as far back as February.

During conversations with sources in football this week, reflections and perceptions around Pimenta were broadly positive.

One source close to a Raiola client warned there is no loyalty in football, while some in the industry speculated that some players may allow her a window or two to prove herself to them before considering their options. Others questioned whether it was the personality and boldness of Raiola that drove the success of the agency and doubted whether Pimenta’s more modest approach will hold the same sway.

Several sources familiar with the agency’s work, however, countered that Pimenta has the “devotion” of many of its players and they trust her entirely to carry on Raiola’s work.

One contact, for example, spoke to Paris Saint-Germain goalkeeper Areola soon after Raiola passed away and they were struck by how the France international instantly said he would remain with Pimenta and insisted nobody was better placed to secure his future, with Premier League clubs Newcastle, Fulham (who signed him on loan for the 2020-21 season) and West Ham (where he spent 2021-22) all interested in a summer move.

A leading European sporting director, speaking anonymously, adds: “Honestly, she always had the perfect balance with Mino. It was not quite good cop to Mino’s bad cop, because she was also tough. But her knowledge of how to do transfers was unsurpassed and we always felt like there was a very clever person behind Mino. Mino respected her in every sense and she was aware of every aspect of their clients.”

Yet even Pimenta’s boldest allies do not dispute she is a very different person to Raiola.

Let’s not forget just how direct the Italian could be.

Raiola started out in his family’s pizzeria in the Dutch town of Haarlem and, at the age of 19, he became a millionaire when he bought a local McDonald’s franchise, then sold it to a property developer. Among his early breaks in football were his parts in the transfers of Dennis Bergkamp from Ajax to Inter Milan in 1993 and Pavel Nedved to Juventus from fellow Italian side Lazio in 2001.

Ibrahimovic’s first impression, detailed in his autobiography, was of “a bloke in jeans and a Nike T-shirt — and that belly, like one of the guys in The Sopranos”. During their first meeting, Raiola told Ibrahimovic, then a youngster at Ajax, to sell his cars, his watches and start training three times harder, “because your stats are rubbish”.

In an interview with the Financial Times six years ago, Raiola recounted the meeting with then-Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson in 2012, where he demanded better terms for a teenage Pogba. When the midfielder, accompanied by Raiola, told Ferguson he would not sign the contract on offer, Ferguson said to Raiola: “You’re a twat.”

Raiola responded: “This is an offer that my chihuahuas — I have two chihuahuas — don’t sign.”

Ferguson called him a twat again. ( From The Athletics)