While we have signed players of many different nationalities over the last four transfer windows, I’ve been intrigued that the source of these players has been very limited. With a few exceptions they have either played for Jol before and/or ‘special’ Agent, Mino Raiola, has been sniffing around. please log in to view this image The rotund 45-year-old was born in Agri, Italy, but his parents emigrated to the Netherlands when he was still an infant, settling in Haarlem. It was here that Raiola was raised before taking the first steps to becoming one of the most influential agents in football. He played for Haarlem’s football club until he was 18 when he decided that playing football wasn’t for him - he had another talent: making deals. Raiola had met many players throughout his childhood, since many of them would visit his parent’s restaurant and at the young age of 18 in 1986, he decided to become a football agent. Raiola is licensed and registered in the Netherlands, and works for Amsterdam-based firm Macguire Tax and Legal, which has offices in Brazil, Montecarlo (where he lives), and the Czech Republic. Raiola speaks 8 languages (if you include Neopolitan, although he always apologizes that his Italian isn’t perfect). His earliest deals were through Ajax, who had profited substantially from Raiola arranged deals during the early '90s but they were less enamoured with the way in which Zlatan Ibrahimovic left for Juventus in 2003. He then cultivated a mutually beneficial relationship with Milan, as further evidenced by his masterminding of Mario Balotelli's switch to the San Siro last week. [Ibrahimovic of course has also moved on twice in lucrative deals.] And, as we know, Raiola manages Martin Jol. Some might argue he got Jol into Fulham for ‘free‘ - after we were unwilling to pay Ajax compensation of £3m to obtain Jol’s services, once he got the sack, Raiola was only waiting for Mark Hughes to leave before making his move! Grygera and Kasami are also on Raiola’s books, but his presence has hovered behind other deals, such as Emmanuelson. My intrigue at our recent transfer deals stretches to wondering what the role of our Scouts is. It seems to me that nowadays all of our senior squad deals are done solely through Agents and the job of the scouts is limited to recruiting youngsters. Not demeaning that in itself since in the last two years this has brought in Dan Burn, Jack Grimmer and George Williams (to mention only a few). However, I do question putting pretty much all of our senior recruitment in the Jol/Raiola basket.
Seems strange as this is similar to the Tigana story which led to his fallout with MAF. Tigana ran an agency in France but when he became our manager he sold it(?) to two brothers. When it came to the Marlet transfer one Brother represented Marlet the other represented Lyon. We bought him for £12m and paid by installments, when we came to pay the last installment of £3m Lyon told us to give it to the agency as their fees. Think MAF asked UEFA to look into the case as he thought the Transfer price had been hiked up. He lost the court case, which transpired that Tigana still had a part in the company and they acted as his agents. Hence that is why relations with MAF and Tigana went to court, which again MAF lost. If you put this in with Mark Hughes having an adviser Kia Joraabchian who seem to have a say in Transfer of players into our club. It would seem to be the norm nowadays to have a well connected agent in your club who brokers deals. But you'd think MAF would be once bitten, twice shy.
As long as we sign players that make us better, I don't give a toss who arranges the deals or who decides on our targets. There are a lot of parallels here so there's probably an element of truth to it, but do I sense a suggestion that Jol is signing players as a means to his own benefit, rather than to improve the squad? Awful lot of assumptions being made. Agents are a massive part of football nowadays (bigger than they should be), as SuperBri says.
Reading my comment back, it reads a bit more confrontational than I intended, haha. Some interesting facts here for sure.
In one sense, Bidley is right that it doesn't matter what route a player comes through if he improves the team. On the other hand, there's a danger that we allow our scouting networks to drift away, meaning that when the manager (and his agent) leave we don't have a scouting structure in place. Maybe. Is it bad that I don't seem able to get worked up one way or the other over this?
It seems a very narrow source to obtain players. However, Fulham don't have the attraction power of some other clubs so it is a case of who you know. In this case the agent.
Fulham are a premiership club with i presume a very organised scouting structure, so it should be possible that we can find our own tallent. if we have to rely on players agents for recomendations, it is a sorry state not only for us but thefuture of our professional game.
What I was thinking was, if we spread our net wider we might not miss out on the Michu's of this world.
This is assuming Mino Raiola is our only source of 'scouting'. I do see what you mean though, there seems to be very few players signed who Jol hasn't worked with and/or isn't connected to this 'super'-agent. If indeed Raiola is our only source of players then what does that mean? Do we think Jol has sacked/ignored/eaten all the scouts in our network? Has the club changed our policy on scouting somewhere? Or perhaps the board and/or Jol trust what they find through Raiola and Jol's past exploits, or those players are simply better than the ones that come through the scouting network. So many questions, very murky business indeed.
I don't know about eating all the scouts, but judging by the photo in Cottager's original post, Raiola has very possibly eaten all the pies.
