MONTE CARLO, Monaco — Even today, it still comes up. Even after a quarter century in the gritty, muddy trench warfare that is football’s transfer system. Even after working side-by-side with the late Mino Raiola, one of the most famous and influential agents out there. Even after representing the likes of Pavel Nedved, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Marco Verratti, Paul Pogba, Erling Haaland and others — a multi-national galaxy of stars, from Ballon d’Or winners (Nedved) to self-anointed deities (Ibrahimovic). Even after having sat across the table and negotiated deals with the biggest clubs — from Real Madrid to Manchester United, from Bayern Munich to Paris St Germain, from Manchester City to Arsenal — and sponsors in the world.
Rafaela Pimenta is a woman. And if she’s in the room and working and important, it must be because of a man. In this case, a man who had “coached her up.”
It happened to her a few months ago. She was dealing with a club executive who had been in the game for a long time, but whom she had never met. She was accompanied by a lawyer who, she says, knew nothing about football, but who was well-versed in the laws of the country where the club operated. After a long and heated negotiation, they finally came to an agreement. That’s when the club executive turned to Pimenta’s lawyer and said, “Oh, you prepared her well.”
The room fell silent. Pimenta’s lawyer, who was merely along to offer advice, was visibly embarrassed, since he wasn’t the one doing the negotiating. He said he didn’t know what the man was talking about. “I said, ‘Don’t worry guys, that’s not a problem … it’s just that now my commission for this deal has doubled … keep talking and it will continue to get worse for you'” Pimenta said, recalling the episode with a laugh.
When she’s done giggling, however, the trace of bitterness in her eyes is evident.
With former director of football Marina Granovskaia leaving Chelsea after the club was sold in June 2022 and Fatma Samoura on her way out as FIFA Secretary General, you can make a case that Pimenta is one, if not the most influential woman in the game today.
Haaland and his father, Alfie (a top pro footballer in his day), specifically sought out Raiola and Pimenta when the player could have convinced just about any agency to represent him. Haaland is from Norway, a country where women in positions of power and influence are not novelty: the Scandinavian nation elected their first female prime minister in the early 1980s and, today, the heads of the country’s three biggest sports federations — football, skiing and athletics — are women.
“It’s super nice to be with them, because it’s one of the few places where I feel if I’m right, I’m right, if I’m wrong, I’m wrong and it doesn’t matter if I’m a man or a woman,” Pimenta says. “That’s a cultural thing [with the Haalands] and it’s really refreshing because it’s one less problem to overcome.”
The agent-client relationship is a delicate one. Some players just want agents to negotiate their contracts; others their commercial deals. Some speak to them no more than three or four times a year, while some are on the phone three or four times by lunch every day. What do they talk about? Everything from how their coaching session went and why their girlfriend was mean to them, to what new car they should buy and how they can get Taylor Swift tickets.
Pimenta says that the relationships, if not properly managed, can develop into codependency. She recalls a story of one agent who made it a point to cater to a player’s every whim. “He was doing stupid things [for the player] that would make sense at 17, but no longer made sense because he was now 23,” she says. When she confronted the agent and said the player needed to learn to do thing for himself, the agent replied: “I don’t want him to learn how to do things for himself, because if he learns, he’ll be independent. And if he’s independent, he won’t need us anymore.”
That agent was soon let go. “I don’t want a player to stay with us because he doesn’t know how to do things. I want him to stay with us because he thinks we can add value, that our expertise and experience can help him make better decisions,” she says. “A good agent isn’t the guy who says, ‘I’ll do it all for you, don’t you worry!’ That’s the road to disaster.
“I tell players ‘What if I die? Would you know what to do? Would you know where your money is?'” Pimenta continues. “And we had an example of it: Mino died … what if I had also died?
“Players need to be empowered as they grow up and you need to let them go. And if they choose to stay, you know it’s a conscious choice.”
Then there’s the fact that football has its own peculiarities. Often, there are three sets of agents when a player switches clubs, all of them involved in setting the transfer fee and the contract: one representing the new club, one the old club and one the player himself. (Sometimes the same agent will represent multiple parties and occasionally, all three; it may make little sense to an outsider, but yeah, that’s the way it works.)
Or consider the fact that even when agents represent players directly, negotiating contracts and salaries on their behalf, they get paid not by their clients, but by the club. Is that a conflict of interest? Maybe, but that’s the nature of the business and it underscores the muscle that top agents wield over the game. The sheer size of the commissions paid to Raiola and Pimenta for some transfers — like the reported £41 million ($50.2m) on the £89m ($109m) transfer of Pogba from Juventus to Manchester United in 2016 — earned them harsh criticism of exploiting their clients from some quarters.
“I’m sure that a few times [these leaks] were designed to expose us and put in a difficult position,” Pimenta says. “But none of our players were surprised. Because they totally knew. They always did.”
Multiple club executives who negotiated with Raiola and Pimenta, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed that they often involved their clients or their families directly at an early stage. This is not usual practice, and it sometimes blind-sided clubs, but it worked to their advantage because it solidified the trust between agent and client. It also made clear whose side they were on.
“I’m not a tough person: I’m a normal person,” Pimenta says. “But if I’m representing somebody, and there is no such thing as keeping your foot in two boats. I think sometimes some agents, because clubs are bigger than players, don’t want to disappoint the club. So they won’t go all the way for the player.”
Pimenta talks about the “challenge” facing agents and the fear of upsetting clubs being “a cancer” in her profession. If you anger a club, they may shut you out, which may affect future players and future deals. Is it worth it?
“The minute you ask this question, you’re doing things wrong,” she says. “If you work for a player, you need to [go] all the way for the player and that means sometimes [it will cost you]. But if you position yourself in the right way and make people understand you’re fighting for your client, often they will respect you.”
To some degree, this is easier to do when you’re a boutique agency representing several dozen elite clients, rather than a mega-agency trying to find a landing spot for an average player in mid-career. But the doggedness and intensity with which Pimenta and Raiola pushed their clients, often with little regard for potential future relationships, was noted by several people who sat across the negotiating table from them.
Those people also underscored how, when they first dealt with Raiola and Pimenta, they expected traditional gender roles. They figured the boisterous, larger-than-life macho Raiola would push the envelope and drive a hard bargain, while the nurturing Pimenta would be the compromising, problem-solving diplomat. Instead, as one executive put it on the condition of anonymity, it wasn’t “good cop/bad cop” — it was “bad cop/bad cop.”
“It’s funny because they’d think that when Mino left the room and I would take over, life would get easier, but after a while they’d want me gone and Mino back,” she says. “We had lots of disagreements between us, but once we were in a negotiation, we were perfectly aligned. And we were perfectly aligned in the way we saw our jobs, football and our clients. We would either survive or die together in a negotiation.”
That chemistry between Raiola and Pimenta dates back nearly three decades.
They first met when Pimenta was doing some legal work for a club set up by former Brazil players, Rivaldo and Cesar Sampaio. At the time, she had recently earned a law degree from Sao Paulo University and was doing some teaching, while working for the Brazilian government’s Antitrust commission. The so-called “Pele Law,” which reformed Brazilian football, had just been passed, and Raiola wanted to know more about its implications. They were both in their 20s and strong-headed; not surprisingly, they clashed at that first meeting, mainly because Pimenta felt Raiola ended up lecturing her.
“If you think you know more than me, why are you here?” Pimenta told him. “If you know Brazilian law so well, why do you need me?” Years later, Raiola told her that she was one of the first people who stood up to him.
