Super-agent Pimenta: Haaland could become world's first one billion pound player

Leading agent discusses sexism in football, the prospect of selling a digital Erling Haaland and what Paul Pogba is really like

Super agent Rafaela Pimenta in Milan

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 Otherwise she would not be published.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.