It is hard to imagine that, in a transfer period that has seen a 19-year-old acquired for €80 million, Angel Di Maria somehow move to a better team, and Arsenal get the keeper that they always needed, that the winner of the 15/16 transfer window won’t play on a single professional pitch this year. He won’t even be in the technical area. As a matter of fact, he could theoretically go an entire year without stepping foot inside a stadium, and still do his job. It would be very hard to actually do that, but knowing the pedigree of this man, I wouldn’t put it beyond him.
The winner of the 15/16 summer transfer window is super agent Jorge Mendes, again.
Mendes facilitated a mind boggling €257 million in transfer fees and variables this summer. If we are to take a 2012 study as applicable today and assume that agents and third parties still receive 28% of all transfer fees as payment for facilitating them, then Mendes and his agency, Gestifute, can claim €71 million in eventual earnings over the past three months.
By the same assumption, Mendes made €76 million off €274 million in transfers in the summer of 2014, potentially bringing his summer haul from 2014 and 2015 up to €147 million. Is this money all going to him? No, but it is all money that he earned.
Mendes already has an almost comical reputation for success — Cristiano Ronaldo, one of his clients, bought him an island for his birthday this year. It seems that he’s just going to keep on winning. I don’t want to call him the “Messi of Agents,” because that’s ridiculous, but the sentiment is there.
Besides, who needs a Ballon d’Or when you make enough money each summer to have several literal balls of solid gold made?
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