Agent Mino Raiola has said that he had been working on Paul Pogba's world-record transfer deal for more than a year.
Midfielder Pogba joined Manchester United from Juventus for £89.3 million on Aug. 9 and that fee easily surpassed the previous world record, which was the £85m that Real Madrid paid for Tottenham Hotspur's Gareth Bale in summer 2013.
Raiola told talkSPORT: "Paul Pogba's deal was one we had been looking at already for a year. Longer than that, maybe. It's a complex deal because it involves a lot of parties and it also involves a lot of high-stakes rights and it's difficult to get it over the line."
The agent was also involved in bringing attacking players Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Henrikh Mkhitaryan to United in the summer transfer window. Raiola admitted that the Premier League had been a target for him.
He said: "I already said, three or four years ago, that Italy was finished. The two leagues that will dominate the world in the next four or five years are the Premier League and German league actually.
"With the Premier League, you also see the entering of new finance from China, which will give it another boost. With Zlatan, we knew that the next step in his career was the step to the Premier League."
Raiola and Ibrahimovic are both strong characters but the agent said that they have worked so effective together over the years because there is mutual respect.
He said: "You need to be respectful to each other. You need to have belief in each other. You need to have the same goal. If you don't respect each other, don't believe in each other and don't have the same goal then what the hell are you doing together?"
Discussing Ibrahimovic's belief that Raiola is fearless, the agent added: "Fearless in his mind is something different to what other people mean but, yes, I don't think you need to work with fear. You need to have an idea of what you are going to do and how you are going to do it. If you are afraid, you better stay at home."
Raiola also said he will carry on maintaining privacy when he is working on deals, saying: "I have a reputation for never talking about the content of deals because the content of the deal is private for the club and the player. If they want to disclose that, I have no problem at all, but I am a service provider."