There is a misconception about Pimenta that she has stepped into the role left by Mino Raiola’s untimely death in April 2020.
Pimenta did work closely with one of football’s most controversial characters but right from the start, she was her own woman; it was one of the main reasons Raiola wanted to work with her, and tracked her down in her native Brazil after an earlier encounter when, as a qualified lawyer, she was asked to act as an interpreter on a deal.
“He said I was the only one who said no to him and because all the others just wanted his money, they would say yes to the craziest projects,” she recalls.
“I thought it would last five minutes. It lasted 35 years.”
Sadly, not all her experiences in that time were positive, especially when it comes to gender inequality.
“When I was doing this years ago, there were very few women in deciding positions,” said Pimenta.
“There was Marina [Granovskaia] at Chelsea but overall, you could count them on your fingers.
“What I would see were many women working in clubs doing lots of things that were decision-making but not being recognized.
“It was a sort of a corridor, and it would always be the same. Scouting, technical, secretary, decision-maker. You would walk past everybody and get to the last door. Behind the last door would be a man.”
Pimenta says she was helped in her own career by women who responded to the fact she gained entry to the final ‘door’.
However, the response of the men whose domain she was entering was often negative.
“We have come a long way from a first meeting I had with a sports director who said to me, ‘you really exist, I thought you were a hooker from Brazil’, to where we are today but many men still use gender to unbalance you.
“They might talk behind my back to make me feel I’m fragile or have less power.”
Pimenta recounts a story from two years ago, she haggled over a contract with a club in the presence of a lawyer she hired purely for his expertise in writing the language she was negotiating in.
Once the deal was struck, the club official said to the lawyer ‘you taught her well’.
“The guy meant it as a compliment,” said Pimenta. “He was trying to be nice. It was unbelievable.”
