Another profitable window for Jorge Mendes, the ‘gatekeeper’ of Portugal

The doors of Club Alfândega remain open, even if one of its former owners has moved on to a bigger stage. Situated in downtown Caminha on Portugal’s border with northern Spain, the nightclub’s establishment in 1989 was inspired by a trip to Ibiza the previous summer.

“What we did was create an innovative space and a new way of exploring the night by inviting public figures, television people and models to be at the door, in the bars and liven up the disco,” said one of its founders Morais Vieira in an interview with a local newspaper in 2014.

It was on one such night at Club Alfândega – which means “customs” in English – that a certain Jorge Mendes famously met Nuno Espírito Santo, the future Wolves and Tottenham manager who would become his first major client. Mendes was then a 30-year-old entrepreneur who also ran a video shop but he took advantage of his chance meeting with the young goalkeeper at the nightclub he part-owned and soon emerged as the world’s most powerful agent.

Nuno, having been frustrated in his attempts to leave Vitória Guimarães, remembered in an interview the Guardian in 2016 how a plan hatched with Mendes, which involved pretending he was drunk in front of Vitória’s president António Pimenta Machado, ended with a move to Deportivo La Coruña. The rest, as the story goes, is history.

The Gestifute agency established by Mendes a few weeks after Nuno’s 1997 transfer now has Cristiano Ronaldo and José Mourinho among its clients and is estimated to have negotiated contracts worth considerably more than £1bn and earned at least £100m in commissions every year since 2015. In a transfer window that has seen record levels of spending by Premier League clubs, this has been a particularly profitable summer