The sports agent met the singer through friends and they were strictly in the friend zone at first.
Agent Rich Paul and Adele attend Game Two of the 2022 NBA Playoffs Western Conference Finals between the Golden State Warriors and the Dallas Mavericks at Chase Center on May 20, 2022 in San Francisco, California.
Photo by Harry How/Getty Images
More than five years into their relationship, Rich Paul is offering some rare insight into the early days of his romance with Adele. In an interview this week with Craig Melvin on the Glass Half Full podcast, Paul, 45, revealed that the couple met through a friend and that at first, though he’d known the “Someone Like You” singer for a while. “It was just cordial, really just cordial,” Klutch Sports Group founder Paul said of the meet-sorta-cute with the Grammy-winning singer.
” … Until it became not so cordial,” Paul added of the friendship that bloomed into a public thing in the summer of 2001 when Adele made a rare public appearance at a Phoenix Suns game that July, one of the first time fans had seen the singer since she released her third studio album, 25, six years earlier. The star, who tends to go completely off-the-radar when she’s not promoting new music, was spotting sitting close to Paul that night, several years after her public split in 2019 with her ex-husband, Simon Konecki, with whom she shares a son, Angelo.
