play2:44Is Weston McKennie Juventus’ best player?The “Futbol Americas” crew discuss Weston McKennie’s recent form for Juventus and the impact it will have on the USMNT.
Is Weston McKennie Juventus’ best player?The “Futbol Americas” crew discuss Weston McKennie’s recent form for Juventus and the impact it will have on the USMNT.
The “Futbol Americas” crew discuss Weston McKennie’s recent form for Juventus and the impact it will have on the USMNT.
Bruce SchoenfeldMultiple AuthorsFeb 4, 2026, 08:30 AM ET
TURIN, Italy — Where was Ali? Nobody knew. Ali Barat, the world’s hottest soccer agent, was supposed to be at the Museo Nazionale dell’Automobile by 5:30 p.m. But it was after 6, and nobody had seen him.
Later that December evening, Paris Saint-Germain’s Désiré Doué would be given the 2025 Golden Boy award as the sport’s top young player. In the spirit of every award ceremony ever, a full undercard of other honors was dispensed first. That included Best Agent, which Barat would win for the second time in three years.
As usual, Barat was staying at a more exclusive hotel than his colleagues at Epic, the agency he founded and runs, which meant he was getting to the event on his own. It should have been easy enough — a driver had been dispatched — but now it was 6:15. Where had he gone? And why wasn’t he answering texts? Ali was probably on a call somewhere working a deal, Yann Guerin, who handles Epic’s media, told me. “He’ll be here.”
And then, as if on command, Barat appeared over Guerin’s shoulder, striding through the glass doors. He wore a charcoal-colored tuxedo with no tie and a gold watch — all dials and knobs — that wouldn’t have seemed out of place on a James Bond villain. He looked like he ran a record label.
Within moments, Barat had nestled between two Sky Sports hosts who were covering the event, where he recounted the extraordinary summer of transfers that won him the award. Then he did a group interview with print reporters, and quick one-on-ones. Guerin looked on approvingly.
Guerin joined Epic in January from PSG, where he worked for 11 years. He was hired, as he explains it, to run Epic’s public relations as though the agency was a major international club. In practice, that has meant hyping its transfers — and the people responsible for them — to the point that Barat is now one of the most famous agents in the world.
It’s important to understand that other agents don’t promote themselves like that. The few of them whose names are out in the world, such as Jorge Mendes and the late Mino Raiola, really don’t promote themselves at all. Even their client lists are shrouded in secrecy. (The Wasserman agency website, for example, requires a password to access player names.)
That doesn’t work for Barat. “Ali is building his brand,” explains Tiago Pinto, the Bournemouth sporting director, who signed Barat’s first client, Tomás Araújo, in 2021 when he was director of professional football at Benfica. “You can see all the hype he gives himself for these awards.”
To Barat, the publicity helps him win the awards, and winning the awards gets him clients. Players’ families get solicited by “thousands of agents,” he explains. “They get bombarded. So how can you make yourself different than the others? The families see that I have won the award and they are like, ‘OK, he’s the best, let me listen to him. He’s different from the thousand other agents who are calling me.'”
“I think he’s right in his assessment,” says an executive of a North American-based company that represents hundreds of international players. “You’ve got the bigger agencies who have a format that clearly works for them, putting their clients forward and staying behind the scenes. I guess he feels like he needs to advertise what he’s doing to be able to compete.”
At first, those histrionic emails felt unseemly. And yet, as the deals accumulated, I began to wonder if this might not be merely a public relations campaign but a true phenomenon. When I asked Guerin, he smiled. “In a few years,” he said, “he’ll have all the best players.”
On the stage, a woman and a man toggled between Italian and English as they presented the awards. When Barat won Best Agent in 2023, mostly for getting Moisés Caicedo to Chelsea from Brighton and Jackson to Chelsea from Villarreal, he was the youngest recipient ever at 43. Then Mendes, who remains soccer’s premier agent of the stars — his company, Gestifute, represents Lamine Yamal, Jose Mourinho and, until recently, Cristiano Ronaldo — won in 2024.
When he heard his name this time, Barat bounded up the steps to accept the trophy from the presenters. His face lit up in a broad smile.
UNTIL 2021, BARAT had never consummated a transfer. Beginning in the early 2010s, he operated as an intermediary, helping agents match players with clubs. “Lower-level players, signing in leagues like Bulgaria,” he says. His biggest commission was €20,000. Before that, he was exporting bauxite and other minerals from South America. “I literally didn’t know what a football agent was,” he says. “I didn’t know that existed it as a job because my world was completely different.”
The son of a diplomat whose family was forced to flee Iran at the start of the 1980s because of the war with Iraq, Barat was 2 years old when his family arrived in England. He grew up in South London as a Chelsea supporter. He’d spend hour after hour immersed in the popular video game Championship Manager, the precursor to Football Manager. “I was always trading players,” he says. “I was building my club. I was obsessed with every single player around the world.”
Eventually, soccer faded into the background. Barat became an international businessman and based himself in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, where he developed a close friendship with a cousin of Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who runs the entity that owns City Football Group. He spent time with Roberto Mancini, then the Manchester City manager. Eventually, he got involved in the soccer business as something of a hobby, helping broker Edin Dzeko’s 2015 move to Roma.
Barat loved that soccer had again become part of his life, but he didn’t consider it a potential career. “It was only after I understood the fees that were involved and how much money agents made that I thought, ‘I can do that,'” he says.
He was confident because he’s always confident, and because, to him anyway, most agents didn’t seem to be particularly good at their jobs. The family members who represented many players, perhaps with help from a local attorney, didn’t have the skills or connections to do much more than accept the biggest offer. The larger firms often employed boilerplate strategies to take their players’ services to market.
Barat understood how to sell commodities. And what were soccer players, according to Barat, but highly specialized and valued commodities? So he laid the groundwork: accumulating phone numbers, nurturing relationships, gaining insight into the sport’s inner workings. By 2020, he says, “I really knew in depth how to deal with clubs. What they were looking for, what they needed, how to approach them.”
In January 2021, he signed Araújo. “He was new,” Araújo, who was 19 and ending his youth trajectory at Benfica’s academy, says of Barat. “But when you sat down with this guy, you could tell that he was different. After that first impression that he made, it was impossible to say no.”
It would have been more lucrative to pull Araújo out of Benfica and offer him around Europe. “We were very, very strict with the contracts at Benfica,” says Pinto. “There’s not much space for players or agents to negotiate money.” Instead, Barat advised Araújo to stay where he felt comfortable and could improve.
The money Barat made from that first signing was minimal, but he was playing the long game, sure that his investment would pay off in a major transfer five or six years down the road. So too would the goodwill he’d generated with Pinto. “My first impression of Ali was very positive,” Pinto says. “He was more focused on the player path than the money or the contract. In that moment, we created the relationship.”
Five years later, Araújo has emerged as one of Europe’s most coveted young defenders. And that neophyte to whom he entrusted his career has been recognized as the world’s Best Agent, at least in the eyes of Tuttosport. “When you work with an agent of this magnitude at 22, it boosts your ego, to be honest,” he gushes.
Before that, Barat told me with evident pride, he was meeting with Fabrizio Romano, whose social media accounts have more than 100 million followers. Romano had only ever done one sit-down interview for his YouTube channel, with Lionel Messi. Barat, not Ronaldo or another superstar, would be the second one.
Such an interview wouldn’t have happened without last summer’s transfers. Whatever you think of Barat — and the industry’s opinions are divided — it was a string of successes as remarkable as Arsenal’s undefeated season, the soccer agent’s equivalent of Jose Mourinho’s Porto team winning the Champions League in 2004.
“It could have been one year or two years,” Pinto says now. “But the end of the story would always have been the same because Dean is a very special player.”
When Huijsen joined Bournemouth, Barat and Pinto agreed on a €50 million release clause, and after his standout 2024-25 season, several clubs were ready to pay it. One good fit was Liverpool, but they wavered for, Barat claims, the most arbitrary of reasons: Huijsen played with his socks drooping toward his ankles, which sent the message of a lack of attention to detail. “They felt that was not the right attitude for the kind of player they wanted,” Barat says.
“His father wasn’t 100% convinced,” Barat admits, “but he was open to have a conversation.” Madueke was playing at the Club World Cup, a difficult situation in which to do a transfer. “But I saw the opportunity and reacted quickly,” Barat says.
Soon it was set — Madueke joined Arsenal on July 19, just six days after Chelsea won the Club World Cup over Paris Saint-Germain — and the requisite email blast sent by Guerin. By then, Jackson’s own transfer saga was already in progress.