Speaking recently on the Football Writers Podcast, Michael Calvin, Richard Amofa and Miguel Delaney discussed some of the biggest talking points in English football at present, and in particular, Wolverhampton Wanderers’ link with Jorge Mendes.
In the past few seasons, Wolves have enjoyed a rather remarkable rise back to the big time in both domestic and European football.
After a 15th-placed Championship finish in their 2016/17 campaign under Paul Lambert, Nuno Espirito Santo was installed as the manager of the club in the following July and swiftly guided Wolves to the Premier League in his first season in charge by winning the second-tier title.
In the two seasons that followed, the club recorded back-to-back seventh-place finishes in the Premier League and reached the quarter-finals of the Europa League last season, losing out eventual winners Sevilla.
This impressive rise has likely been helped by the acquisition of a number of players, including the likes of Ruben Neves, Rui Patricio, Diogo Jota, Joao Moutinho, Daniel Podence and Pedro Neto – all of whom share the shame agency firm, Gestifute, which was founded by Jorge Mendes.
It could be argued that the reason a number of the agent’s clients end up at Molineux is that Mendes acts as an advisor to Wolves, which is something that Delaney discussed on a recent episode of the Football Writers Podcast.
He said: “[We’ve] got to be careful how we put this – there are so many Mendes players either coming in or out, I would say it’s rare that you see a club have this extensive relationship with an agent.
“I say it’s rare, except only last week when I was doing research for a [Roman] Abramovich piece, I was reading over the Diego Torres book on Jose Mourinho’s time at Real Madrid, and repeatedly in those pages, there are questions raised from people at Madrid about why Mourinho was trying to sign so many Mendes players and the amount of Mendes players involved in the team.”
He continued: “Why Wolves is all the more striking, because even though, of course, they have their own analytical approach [to signing players], it’s a much more network-based recruitment system than pretty much any other big club, at the moment.”
Are you concerned by the fact that Wolves do so much of their transfer business with Mendes?
Yes
No
TIF Thoughts…
From Delaney’s comments, it would seem as if the journalist believes it is quite rare for a club to have such a positive relationship with one agent in particular, and that the club’s ‘network-based recruitment system’ is different to a number of other big clubs at present.
However, considering Wolves’ rise over the last few years, it would seem that the system the club currently have in place regarding recruitment is working very well, so, in our opinion, we would not expect that to change any time soon.