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 encountered only two other women in positions of power. “I dealt with Marina Granovskaia [the former Chelsea director who oversaw the club’s transfers during the Roman Abramovich era] and I met Karren Brady once at West Ham. That’s it.”
