London - Manchester United have known for several years that a suspicion of football agents can have unhappy consequences. Sir Alex Ferguson's distaste for Mino Raiola, Paul Pogba's representative, got to a stage where he would no longer entertain the contractual demands for the player. So Pogba took his services to Juventus for next to nothing and a sum of €90m was not enough to bring him back to England, when Manchester City tried last summer.
But the financial consequences of crossing swords with Raiola are nothing compared with the dangers of a deepening dependency on the Portuguese Jorge Mendes. It will begin to feel like a Mendes annexation if United's drift towards signing the agent's prime managerial client - Jose Mourinho - results in him arriving at Old Trafford this summer.
United's options are narrowing, with Ryan Giggs, championed by Ferguson, the only alternative candidate and time in short supply, now that their attempts to ascertain whether United's reputation might tempt Pep Guardiola have drawn a negative reply. Ferguson may have worked football's back corridors to establish the strength of Guardiola's resolve to join Manchester City.
If Mourinho does arrive, with United not rejecting suggestions of contact on Friday night, then we will see two distinct power bases coming into sharper view at Old Trafford. Ed Woodward, the executive vice-chairman, will be aligning himself with Mendes - the man who has brought him Angel Di Maria, Radamel Falcao, Anthony Martial and kept David De Gea at the club. The Giggs advocates are those of the “old” United: Ferguson, his one-time chief executive David Gill and the Class of '92. The second group are becoming marginalised, with United's Football Club Board, including Ferguson, Gill, Mike Edelman and Sir Bobby Charlton, less influential now. Gill told BBC's Sportsweek last month that the Football Club Board “has much more of an ambassadorial role”.
If Woodward stakes United's future on the Mourinho/Mendes axis, we can expect to see a great deal more of the super-agent around Old Trafford. By the end of 2011, Mourinho's second year at Real Madrid, Mendes had Mourinho, Cristiano Ronaldo, Pepe, Ricardo Carvalho, Fabio Coentrao, Di Maria and Marcelo Vieira as clients at the Bernabeu. That's half a team: a huge power base that could potentially affect whether a manager gets the sack and who is signed.
We've already witnessed this danger in microcosm at Old Trafford. United were phlegmatic about the failure of Bebe, one of Ferguson's worst signings, in 2010, because of the knowledge that other clients might flow from the same well of the Mendes Gestifute agency. Sure enough, De Gea arrived from Atletico Madrid 12 months after Bebe. Make no mistake: Mendes' loyalties are with his clients, not United.
His presence can permeate a club. One source tells of how Mendes virtually had an office in Real's Valdebebas base when Mourinho was there, and was free to wander everywhere bar the gym and dressing room, enjoying the free breakfast buffet with the coaching staff in the cafeteria every morning, joking with his own band of client players.
That would be anathema to Ferguson, even though he has described Mendes as “the best agent I've dealt with, without a doubt”. But that position of power is available because of the chronic lack of pure football experience among those controlling Old Trafford.
Gill's departure, concurrent with Ferguson's, compounded the problem. It was perhaps not fully appreciated at the time how much more than match-to-match management Ferguson, with his vast footprint and reputation, was making happen. His nod was all that United needed where signings were concerned. Planning for three years into the future was straightforward because Ferguson, the man who started something, was always going to be there to see it through.
If United were to start from scratch and set up a football business today, there is no way they would put the responsibility to identify, evaluate, negotiate for and sign up players solely in the hands of an executive vice-chairman whose experience lies in the corporate world. “Who's the next manager?” may be the question on everyone's lips but what the club need most is an individual with a track record in football, not business, operating at the top of the club on football issues, particularly acquisitions. In the vacuum, it feels like a tract of the football side of the business is being outsourced to Mendes.
Mendes will argue that he was the man who delivered Martial to Old Trafford when their search for a striker had come to nothing and that he kept De Gea in Manchester. But perhaps United should be interested in the bemusement felt by Real Madrid when they found that Mendes was in Monaco, seeing Martial on his way, rather than Madrid, helping the Real president, Florentino Perez, sign De Gea: a deal that ended in farce and acrimony. There are conflicts of interest all over the place with individuals like Mendes. He is smart, experienced, impressive and influential, but that's no reason to put United's destiny in his hands.
The Independent