Paul Pogba left exposed by Mino Raiola’s war of words with Pep Guardiola | Daniel Taylor

Apr 07, 2018

Offering Paul Pogba to his club’s rivals is a classic, aggressive Mino Raiola trick. But does this join up some of the dots when it comes to the deterioration in the player’s form?

The first time Zlatan Ibrahimovic met Mino Raiola, the agent who has looked after his business for the last 15 years, was when a journalist friend, Thijs Sleiger from Voetbal International, had set them up with a meeting at the Okura hotel in Amsterdam. Ibrahimovic’s former agent, Anders Carlsson, had blown the previous arrangement by offering his client, then a player at Ajax, a move to Southampton (to which the young Zlatan apparently replied: “What the fuck! Southampton! Is that my level?”) The next guy, Ibrahimovic had been told, was a mafioso type. Raiola wasn’t that big in the industry at the time but he was on his way up and could offer more, undoubtedly, than Southampton.

“I wore my cool brown leather jacket from Gucci,” Ibrahimovic recalled. “I had no intention of being the idiot in the tracksuit who gets screwed over again. I put on my gold watch, drove there in my Porsche and parked right outside. It was like: ‘Here I come,’ and I went into that hotel and, well, that hotel! It’s right alongside the Amstel canal and is amazingly elegant and luxurious, and I thought: ‘This is it, I’ve got to play it cool now,’ and I went into the sushi restaurant in the hotel. We’d booked a table and I didn’t really know what sort of person to expect, probably some sort of pin-striped fella with an even bigger gold watch. But who the hell turned up? A bloke in jeans and a Nike T-shirt – and that belly, like one of the guys in the Sopranos. Was he supposed to be an agent, that weirdo?”

Pogba’s reaction was to post the words 'say what?' on social media. But did anyone expect him to admit it might be true?

Tags: Football Manchester City Manchester United Paul Pogba Pep Guardiola Sport