Super-agent Pimenta: Haaland could become world's first one billion pound player
Rafaela Pimenta is often described as the most powerful woman in football because her work as an agent, with a roster of players headed by Erling Haaland, offers her a rare influence in a world dominated by men. For more than 20 years Pimenta forged a lucrative working relationship with Mino Raiola. She was an unobtrusive force as a former academic and lawyer, from Brazil, who closed some of the biggest deals in world football while Raiola grabbed the attention as a boisterous super-agent.
Since Raiola’s death last year, Pimenta has taken a more public role as she heads her agency in Monaco. Yet, as Pimenta explains calmly over lunch, in all her decades in men’s football she has only encountered two other women in positions of power. “I dealt with Marina Granovskaia [the former Chelsea director who oversaw the club’s transfers during the Abramovich era] and I met Karren Brady once at West Ham. That’s it.” Pimenta smiles wryly. “But it was the case all those years ago that a woman would write a book and use a man’s name. Otherwise she would not be published. So many women were involved in important scientific inventions and never took credit. It’s really shocking. But it’s also shocking to see that still today.
“To make yourself heard as a woman you have to prove yourself much more than men do, all the time. If you get angry, you’re a bitch. If you react, you’re overreacting because you’re an emotional woman. If you want to be a leader, you’re too ambitious, cold, hard. For a guy it’s OK to be like this. We are in an industry where there is no equality. Look what happened with the women’s World Cup. What the hell was that?”
Pimenta represents Esther González and Misa Rodríguez who played for Spain in their victorious
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