The Portuguese super-agent is busy closing deals this month, but is he starting to wield too much influence in football?
When Jorge Mendes got married a few years back a story emerged that Cristiano Ronaldo had given football’s most potent agent a Greek island as a wedding present.
It is hard to know the real truth of this. But it seems fitting, given Mendes’s deep-state mystique, that the legend of Ronaldo island has been recycled admiringly ever since, gaining resonance, layers, compound interest. Either way it seems likely Mendes would have enjoyed his Greek island in the expected style: loaning it to Lazio for five years, setting up a complex series of loans for its outlying archipelago, then selling it on to Turkey for six times the original price. Cristiano. You know me so well.
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