Super agent Mino Raiola, who represents Paul Pogba, Zlatan Ibrahimovic and many others, has fired a massive shot at Liverpool Manager Jurgen Klopp. It’s a shot that we can’t use in the headlines because search engines and news aggregators penalize you for including curse words.
Raiola was sticking up for another one of his clients, Mario Balotelli, who Liverpool just sold to Nice. After flopping massively at LFC, the Reds loaned Balotelli to AC Milan, where the Italian striker again failed.
Liverpool then left Balotelli off their preseason tour of the United States, and relegated him to training with the U21s this preseason.
Raiola did not seem to like that very much.
“In the end, the higher-ups at Liverpool admitted that Klopp was wrong,” Raiola told Gazzetta dello Sport.
“I’m not trying to judge him as a coach — although, for me, he’s not a good coach — but he didn’t understand that Balotelli is, whatever else, a person.
“Mario has been exemplary. He never complained about training alone. To say that it was wrong of Klopp would be an understatement, he was a piece of shit about it.”
Wow! Harsh! I guess Raiola has become even further emboldened since he purchased Al Capone’s mansion; fresh off a record breaking, insanely lucrative summer transfer window. Yes, it was an especially good summer for Raiola’s bottom line.
You got to laugh at the absurdity of his “I’m not trying to judge”…and then ripping Klopp to pieces in the very next phrase. You’d think that even Raiola himself can even see the irony there. No matter what you feel about Balotelli, or Raiola, it’s worth mentioning that another player benched by Klopp, and later jettisoned, defender Martin Skrtel, also called Klopp a vulgar obscenity.
Skrtel called Klopp “a dickhead” on his Instagram account, but later deleted it, and then tried to push the blame onto someone else.
That’s what happened over the weekend. Raiola has since doubled down, tripled, quadrupled down etc. on his previous comments.
Raiola told talkSPORT on Monday morning:
“At the end of the day, he [Balotelli] was a player of Liverpool and you need to treat him with respect,” Raiola said. “And he [Klopp] didn’t do that.
“Mario asked several times to have a friendly match. You can train all you want but, at the end of the day, you need 90 minutes, you need a friendly. He never considered him for 60 days.
“I’m not judging him as a trainer — I don’t like him as a trainer at all — but you have to let him play.”
“I don’t need to go to Klopp to do business. If Klopp wants a player that I represent and he wants to talk to me, good. If he doesn’t want to talk to me then I can say to my player: ‘he doesn’t want to talk to me, you can choose another agent or go with a lawyer.’
“I will never be standing in the middle of the interest of my player but it doesn’t mean I have to shut up when I see things are not being done in a good way.
“I have no problem to talk to Liverpool tomorrow and offer them one of my players. If I have to be afraid of speaking my mind because I lose a deal, then I lose my powers. I’d rather go walking through life than living on my knees.”
Paul M. Banks runs The Sports Bank.net, partnered with FOX Sports Engage Network. and News Now. Banks, a former writer for the Washington Times, currently contributes regularly to the Chicago Tribune’s RedEye publication and Bold Global.
He also consistently appears on numerous radio and television talk shows all across the country. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram and Sound Cloud.
