Mino Raiola has made Paul Pogba's name toxic in world football

Mino Raiola and Paul Pogba have once again been scheming in the build-up to the start of a transfer market and with only a few weeks to go before the January window opens, Raiola has begun making the necessary preparations for his client to make a winter exit from Old Trafford. We’ve been here before and this certainly isn’t the first time that Raiola has made waves at Manchester United, in fact, the super-agent often holds the Red Devils to ransom. 

Raiola obviously feels that he is able to bully Manchester United’s management as well as their board, and that’s one of the reasons that Sir Alex Ferguson sold Raiola's client, Pogba, to Juventus in 2012. Indeed, you can’t imagine this pattern of behaviour would have been accepted under Ferguson, who famously called Wayne Rooney’s agent out in October 2010 after saying that the forward was being badly advised. It was only a week later that Rooney signed a new long term deal with Manchester United.  

Incidentally, that type of hard-line management has seemed to have modeled Rooney into the manager he is today. Granted, success may be quite far off still with Derby County’s English Championship odds on promotion being as high as 200/1, but you can already see that Rooney will be the type of manager who tolerates very little outside interference from agents, just like Ferguson did. Perhaps one day the ex-Manchester United player will even step into the dugout at Old Trafford to deal with threatening agents like Raiola, after all, he has already admitted to taking advice from Ferguson as he tries to impress at Pride Park. But for now, it falls on Ole Gunnar Solskjaer's shoulders to deal with a man who is intent on severing all ties his client has with the club. 

The obvious problem that Raiola will encounter though as he goes about burning down the house, is that there won’t be too many suitors stepping forward to take Pogba off Manchester United's hands. Firstly, United paid £89 million for Pogba in 2016 when they took him back from Juventus after a four-year stay in Turin. If Ed Woodward is to sanction a deal for Pogba, he will want to recoup all of that fee and more which in this current climate, seems a bit improbable at best.

But perhaps most significantly, even if a club out there did have deep enough pockets to make a deal happen, there will be very few who would be prepared to put up with the double act of Raiola and Pogba. Neither agent nor player seems overly keen on flying below the radar and controversy is never too far off when they’re involved, two traits the best team environments try to avoid at all costs. 

So even if Mino Raiola is shouting from the rooftops that his client is unhappy and needs to leave Manchester United, the reality of a deal actually taking place is really quite different.

Make no mistake, the chickens of Mino Raiola and Paul Pogba will soon come home to roost after years of publicly antagonizing the Manchester United board. The football world has been watching on and won’t want anything to do with the toxic duo.