It has been more than two years since Wolverhampton Wanderers last switched on the Gestifute searchlight and summoned Jorge Mendes to get them out of trouble.
In the 25 months since Mendes helped finally bring Julen Lopetegui to Molineux in a deal that ultimately saved them in another fraught Premier League season, Wolves owners Fosun have attempted to end the reliance on the super agent who has been intrinsically linked with them since they completed their Molineux takeover in 2016.
But this weekend, when their latest top-flight campaign reached breaking point and with their preferred options for a rescue exhausted, Wolves turned to him once more.
Vitor Pereira’s candidacy had been around in the background for the past few weeks, ever since it became evident to those in charge that Gary O’Neil’s Molineux reign was coming to an end.
He was one of the contenders proposed by Mendes immediately after the Fosun takeover. However, the Chinese conglomerate offered the job to Lopetegui and then gave it to Walter Zenga once the Spaniard had walked away from a verbal agreement to instead manage Spain’s national team.
Pereira has long coveted a chance to manage in the Premier League and was close to landing the Everton job in 2022 that eventually went to Frank Lampard, so Wolves, via Mendes, knew of his availability despite his employment in the Saudi Pro League with Al Shabab.
But he did not fit their perfect profile to replace O’Neil. Had he done so, the head coach who has looked and sounded broken for several weeks now would have been sacked much sooner.
Instead, Wolves persisted with the model they have been trying to implement since the departure of club legend Nuno Espirito Santo three-and-a-half years ago and attempted to lure a manager to fit into the football management structure led by sporting director Matt Hobbs.
Coaches with a recent history of Premier League success or pedigree from other top European leagues were sounded out discreetly, most notably the former Brighton and Chelsea coach Graham Potter, but none of those top-tier managers could be persuaded.
Hobbs and executive chairman Jeff Shi, Fosun’s representative in the UK, then had to weigh up the risks of persisting with O’Neil as his reign unravelled versus the risk of taking a chance on a manager outside their list of preferred solutions.
When the chaotic scenes that followed Saturday’s demoralising 2-1 defeat to Ipswich Town convinced Shi and Hobbs that continuing to back O’Neil was no longer a viable option, they concluded quickly that Pereira was the ‘best of the rest’ and turned to Mendes.
Negotiations opened on Saturday evening, with Wolves indicating a willingness to trigger his Al Shabab release clause, as revealed by The Athletic, and by Sunday afternoon, a deal was progressing swiftly.
Hobbs and Shi were heavily involved and Hobbs’ role in the much-needed squad strengthening expected to happen in January will be crucial, but it was Mendes’ involvement that eventually enabled the deal to be done so quickly.
Mendes has retained his place as a trusted confidante of Shi despite Wolves’ attempts to limit his influence. His success in placing another of his clients in the manager’s office at Molineux will inevitably increase his influence, at least in the short term, and makes this latest move feel like a partial return to ‘Fosun: Phase One’.
To tell this story, The Athletic has spoken to multiple people familiar with the situation, many of whom are speaking anonymously to protect relationships.
On Saturday morning, O’Neil, who had returned to his family home in Kent for a flying visit after the Ipswich defeat, took a phone call from Hobbs to inform him of Wolves’ decision.
It would not have come as a shock given his departure has looked increasingly inevitable for much of this season. Even at the height of his Wolves success, the cracks were appearing.
In a single month — February 2024 — O’Neil’s Wolves claimed famous, emphatic Premier League victories at Chelsea and Tottenham Hotspur, completing the double over both ‘Big Six’ clubs, stood toe to toe with Manchester United before losing a 4-3 Molineux thriller in stoppage time, and defeated Brighton to reach the quarter-finals of the FA Cup.
They saw off Sheffield United for good measure and, as spring arrived with some fans dreaming of pushing for a spot in Europe, it felt like players, management, club and supporters were in harmony for the first time since Nuno Espirito Santo departed, drawing a line under the club’s most successful spell since the early 1980s.
Yet already the seeds of the decline had been sown.
The failures of the January transfer window, when O’Neil was confident of adding a striker to his squad, only to discover in the final days of the window that Wolves would not sanction any of the deals on the table, left the former Bournemouth boss disenchanted with life at Molineux.
Neither he nor the Wolves hierarchy could have foreseen the scale of the injury crisis that robbed him of his first-choice forward line for much of the final third of the campaign, with Pedro Neto, Hwang Hee-chan and Matheus Cunha all injured for several weeks.
But O’Neil felt his warnings that Wolves were risking their immediate future by not adding understudies had gone unheeded. The result was a quarter-final defeat to Coventry with raw teenager Nathan Fraser leading the line, combined with a slide from the outskirts of the European race to the bottom half of the Premier League table with just two wins in their final 12 league games.
In a worrying echo of the breakdown in trust between Wolves and O’Neil’s predecessor Lopetegui, O’Neil’s confidence in the owners’ ability and willingness to back him was never restored.
People familiar with the situation say O’Neil was angry for much of the transfer window due to what he saw as broken promises over his desire for a centre-back and a winger who could step straight into his first team and replace the departed Maximilian Kilman and Pedro Neto.
Instead, striker Jorgen Strand Larsen is the only summer signing to have cemented a place in the team, while several other fairly costly signings were young players with an eye to Wolves adding value in the future.
After the closure of the window, O’Neil’s anger was said to have subsided as he resolved to make the best of the squad he had.
But a combination of tricky early fixtures — the toughest opening of any club in the league based on Opta’s Power Rankings — and squad deficiencies meant Wolves’ season spiralled out of control, not helped by O’Neil’s decision to change their playing style based on signings he expected but which never arrived.
In the end, he left Wolves with goodwill still intact. His relationship with Hobbs remained especially strong, with O’Neil considering that Hobbs had kept up his end of the bargain by lining up deals for first-team players that ultimately went unsanctioned.
Senior players also remained supportive of O’Neil, but their loss of discipline in recent weeks, from Jose Sa venturing into the crowd during the defeat to Bournemouth to Mario Lemina’s meltdown at West Ham and the ugly scenes after the weekend defeat to Ipswich involving Matheus Cunha and Rayan Ait-Nouri, suggested that while O’Neil retained support, he had lost authority.
That realisation, combined with continued dreadful results, left Wolves with no choice but to make a change. Even senior figures at Wolves accepted that O’Neil was to a large extent a victim of circumstance.
The job he did last season in taking over a squad rocked by Lopetegui’s eve-of-the-season departure and leading Wolves well clear of relegation trouble while claiming memorable wins and big-name scalps earned him widespread respect in the Molineux hierarchy.
And the club’s decision-makers were painfully aware that those key injuries at the end of last season, combined with a horrible set of fixtures at the start of this one, helped destroy the momentum he had created.
Yet there were also decisions that haunted the young, inexperienced head coach.
He was heavily involved in the summer in the appointment of Jack Wilson as Wolves’ first set-piece coach, only to go back on the decision and move Wilson out three months later, with people familiar with the matter saying O’Neil decided he had not integrated well into the backroom staff.
Both with and without Wilson, Wolves’ failure to defend set pieces has been a constant problem.
That saga raised questions about O’Neil’s judgement, as did the replacement just a few days ago of Lemina as captain following his post-match meltdown at West Ham after O’Neil had chosen the Gabon international in the summer to replace Kilman as skipper. Lemina, 31, grappled with West Ham’s Jarrod Bowen after the 2-1 defeat, then clashed with team-mates Nelson Semedo and Toti and pushed first-team coach Shaun Derry.
The change of tactics and shape, including a switch to a back four, at the start of the season was also a risk O’Neil did not need to make and invited criticism given the previous use of three central defenders and a counter-attacking style had worked well last season until injuries struck, with the gap between the club’s expected goals for and against trending in the wrong direction this season.
With O’Neil increasingly looking unable to solve the immediate defensive and man-management problems he faced, the Wolves hierarchy concluded that a figure with more experience and gravitas was needed.
How far the return to Mendes goes is not yet clear. When Lopetegui arrived with the agent’s help two years ago, his appointment was followed by a January spending spree in which the Portuguese agent was also involved, with almost £100million committed on signings including Cunha, Lemina, Craig Dawson, Joao Gomes and Pablo Sarabia.
There are multiple reasons why Wolves will be reluctant to repeat that move.
That unscheduled heavy spending played a significant part in creating the profit and sustainability rules (PRS) issues that led to a virtual fire sale of talent six months later to avoid possible sanctions.
Wolves have invested time and effort both before and since to move the club to a more traditional recruitment model, with Hobbs in charge of sourcing lower-cost signings who can improve and command a re-sale profit.
And Fosun have set an ambition for Wolves’ football operations to be self-sufficient.
Yet there is also a realisation that the summer window of 2024 did not strengthen the first XI and that first-team-ready additions are needed in January to give Pereira a fighting chance of reversing their fortunes. Sales mean there are no PSR problems, but funds must be generated by the club.
As Wolves look for signings — especially at the heart of defence, with a centre-back a January priority — there is a distinct possibility that Mendes will be involved.
Despite his stellar success in providing a host of successful players including Ruben Neves, Raul Jimenez, Joao Moutinho and Rui Patricio, relations between Mendes and Wolves have been strained at various points in recent times.
The signings of Matheus Nunes and Goncalo Guedes from his stable in the summer of 2022 were viewed as expensive missteps — albeit Wolves turned a profit on Nunes when he joined Manchester City a year later — while there was annoyance two years ago when Mendes was seen as urging Gomes to choose Lyon, another club with whom he enjoys close links, over Wolves.
And his relationship with Lopetegui is understood to have weakened during the Spaniard’s spell at Wolves, with the pair disagreeing over Mendes’ recruitment recommendations.
The appointment of O’Neil to replace Lopetegui was the first one of Fosun’s tenure from which Mendes was excluded entirely.
Yet his links with Shi and the ownership group have never gone away, despite Hobbs’ increasing prominence and power in recent times.
The surprise signing in the summer of Andre, the Brazilian midfielder linked with a South American agent close to Mendes, hinted that his influence remained, especially given O’Neil had not prioritised that part of his squad for strengthening.
And in their moment of need, Wolves have turned once more to Shi’s most storied footballing contact. With a crucial few months ahead, Mendes feels like a significant figure at Molineux once more.
(Top photo: Getty Images; design: Dan Goldfarb)
