Is Jorge Mendes grip on Wolves too tight?
The last transfer window will surely have banished any doubts regarding the overwhelming influence wielded by the super-agent Jorge Mendes at Wolverhampton Wanderers.
Wolves’ three most important signings and the three most lucrative sales involved players who are represented by Gestifute, Mendes’s agency. The value of the six deals came to about £140 million, and Gestifute has made many millions of pounds from the transactions.
The most remarkable of the deals was for Fábio Silva, the 18-year-old striker signed for a club-record €40 million (about £36 million) having played only 12 matches — scoring one goal — for Porto in the Portuguese league last season. Public documents registered by Porto on the Portuguese stock exchange revealed that the club paid Gestifute €7 million for that deal, 17.5 per cent of the fee they received, with another €3 million going to other intermediaries.
If as is possible, and indeed likely, Gestifute represented Wolves as the registering club as well as the player in the deal, the agency would have been paid by both those parties too.
The other five deals involving Mendes’s clients were: Diogo Jota to Liverpool (£45 million), Matt Doherty to Tottenham Hotspur (£14.7 million), Hélder Costa to Leeds United (£16 million), Nélson Semedo from Barcelona (£27.5 million) and the loan move of Vitinha from Porto, which is expected to become a permanent transfer next summer.
It is by no means unheard of for an agent to develop a close relationship with a club, but this goes even farther with Wolves and Mendes: for the past five years a subsidiary of Wolves’ Chinese owners Fosun International, Foyo, has had a 15 per cent stake in Start SGPS, Gestifute’s parent company.
The FA has rules on intermediaries that state: “Any individual or entity with an interest in a club shall not have any interest in the business or affairs of an intermediary or an intermediary’s organisation.” Nevertheless the governing body has approved the Wolves-Mendes relationship, despite complaints two years ago from the Leeds United owner Andrea Radrizzani that it was “not legal or fair”.
Although there is no suggestion of illegality, just how the relationship complies with the rules is not clear: the FA will not give details but merely states it has had confirmation from Wolves and relevant parties including Mendes about their ongoing compliance with its intermediary regulations.
The Doherty transfer to Spurs stands out as one where Mendes appeared to have a finger in every portion of the pie. As well as Gestifute’s links to Wolves’ owners, the club’s head coach, Nuno Espírito Santo, was the first client that Mendes ever had; the defender is his client; and Doherty was sold to Tottenham, whose head coach, José Mourinho, is also a long-time Mendes client.
Confirmation of exactly how many of the parties were represented by Gestifute or Mendes’s associates in Wolves’ six key transfers will not be published by the FA until next year, but last season the club had eight intermediary transactions where Gestifute or Talents Throne, the agency owned and operated by Mendes’s close associate Valdir Cardoso, were named as representing both player and club. In a further three intermediary transactions, Gestifute or Talents Throne represented just Wolves, and in three more the agency represented a Wolves player’s former club.
The practice of representing player and club has long been regarded by many in the game as a conflict of interest. Gary Lineker, the former England striker and BBC presenter, has called on Fifa to “introduce a rule where no person can act or receive fees for more than one party in any deal”, adding: “Clubs should not pay a player’s agent, whether selling or buying. The player should negotiate his commission with his agent.”
Fifa’s football stakeholders committee last year recommended that there should be regulation to limit multiple representations to avoid such conflicts, and a cap of 10 per cent of agents’ commissions on transfer fees, but so far no such measures have yet been implemented.
Greg Dyke, the former FA chairman, said regulation of agents in the game was urgently needed. He told The Times: “The role of agents is one of the great untold scandals of modern football. For years everyone has known one of the biggest problems in football — if not the biggest — are the agents and the inability of Fifa, Uefa and the FA to regulate them.
“Not only can they represent both the player and a club, you even get the ridiculous situation where they represent both sides of the same deal. All the clubs moan about agents and then they all pay them.
“This has to be done by Fifa and Uefa — the FA can’t attempt to take it on alone, and the last attempt by Fifa to regulate agents failed dismally.”
Two years ago, the Football Leaks cache resulted in European media organisations publishing emails from the Wolves executive chairman, Jeff Shi, who also works for Fosun, to a Gestifute contact in 2016 saying: “You always know the reason for the investment of Wolves is mainly because of our bet and trust on Jorge. Jorge can take Wolves as the most reliable partner and agency revenue source for long, long time.”
Gestifute and Wolves declined to comment when approached by The Times, but a source close to Mendes insisted that he deals with clubs from all over the world — for example Rúben Dias, the Portugal defender signed by Manchester City this window for £62 million, is another of his clients — and pointed out the Wolves-Gestifute relationship was cleared by the EFL and the FA in 2018.
“Jorge always looks for the best options for the players and for all clubs,” the source said.
Even in this era of relative austerity in the transfer market because of the Covid-19 pandemic, it appears that Mendes at least, and thanks in no small measure to his Wolves connections, has contrived to ensure that his money supply has remained in full flow.
