How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization

by Franklin Foer

  Perhaps the public could have su¤ered these indig-nities. But the rulers of the Brazilian game have committed sins beyond depriving fans of amenities. They have disorganized the game itself. Every year they concoct a di¤erent system for the league, a new calendar and formula for winning the championship. One season, revenue from ticket sales was factored into playo¤

  qualification. Schedules become so cluttered with meaningless tournaments that players essentially never have an o¤-season.

  A few seats away, at half-time of the Botafogo game, a man is reading a newspaper story about Ronaldo.

  According to the piece, Real Madrid is trying to buy the bucktoothed striker o¤ Internazionale of Milan for $20

  million. In Pelé’s day, the greatest Brazilian players HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE SURVIVAL OF THE TOP HATS

  played in Brazil, and, therefore, Brazilian fans were treated to the greatest games on the planet. Now, even my most soccer mad friends in Brazil have a hard time naming the players on storied clubs like Botafogo. Of the twenty-two players who wore their country’s radioactive yellow jerseys in the World Cup, only seven currently play in their home country. An estimated 5,000 Brazilians have contracts with foreign teams. The exodus of Brazilian soccer play is one of the great migra-tions of talent in recent history, the sports equivalent of the post-Soviet brain drain or the flight of intellectuals from war-torn African countries. Brazilian heroes have become something like the war in Chechnya—distant and foreign, extant only in rare appearances for the national team and the dispatches of stringers.

  V.

  Well before President Cardoso named him to his cabinet, Pelé had maintained a cozy relationship with power. During the military dictatorship, he didn’t complain when the regime lifted his image for its propaganda. When asked about the generals’ unwillingness to hold elec-tions, he once replied that he considered Brazilians too stupid to vote. He’d even struck up a friendship with Henry Kissinger. The role of rebel and reformer hadn’t come naturally to Pelé, and he could only sustain it for so long. After using his prestige to shove his raft of anti-corruption, pro-capitalist reforms, the Pelé Laws, down the congress’s gullet in 1998, he resigned from the government, to return to his lucrative life as the smiling icon. But without the force of Pelé behind the Pelé Laws, the soccer lobby recovered the upper hand. Pelé’s laurels withered before he could rest upon them. Two years after his retirement, his opponents orchestrated legislation undoing the most important reforms before they fully took e¤ect. The cartolas wouldn’t have to keep open books or face legal accountability for their accounting antics. As always, corruption in Brazil proved remarkably resilient. When faced with this fact, it was as if Pelé resigned himself to the reign of the cartolas. In February 2001, Pelé staged a press conference with the tainted chief of Brazilian soccer, Ricardo Teixeira, in Rio.

  They’d joined together, in Pelé’s words, in a “pact to save Brazilian soccer.” Teixeira announced that Pelé would head a special commission charged with reorganizing the administration of the sport. He then kissed the king’s ring. “I made a huge mistake by distancing myself from the nation’s greatest idol. I am acknowledging my remorse and am counting on Pelé’s nobility to accept my apologies.” Then, in front of the cameras, for the front pages of the papers, Teixeira and Pelé embraced.

  In truth, nothing could have further undermined Pelé’s nobility. No longer was he the scourge of the cartolas. At the conference, he condemned the congressional investigation for destroying the prestige of the national game. He’d given Teixeira credibility at the moment congress was ready to drive the stake into the cartolas. José Trajano, a columnist for the sports daily Lance!, thundered, “The union of Pelé and Ricardo Teixeira is the biggest stab in the back that those of us fighting for ethics in sport could receive. . . . He has sold his soul to the devil.” HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE SURVIVAL OF THE TOP HATS

  After the embrace, anti-corruption crusaders turned on Pelé. Reform-minded journalists began reconsidering Pelé’s tenure as sports minister. In retrospect, it was obvious that he had been less than idealistic. Pelé’s business partner had written the bulk of the Pelé Laws. At the same time Pelé’s business associates wrote the laws, they freely admitted that they hoped to profit from them.

  Pelé had displayed a troubling lack of ethical common sense in other ways, too. He’d advised foreign investors to direct their money into some of the most corrupt enterprises in Brazil. In 1998, for example, he helped broker the relationship between Eurico Miranda and NationsBank.

  Suddenly, the icon had become ripe for a takedown.

  Some of the allegations were meaningless tabloid grist: The newsmagazine Istoe Gente broke a report of a thirty-two-year-old illegitimate daughter in New York.

  Unfortunately, he’d left a trail of malfeasance that led to a far more damaging story. Throughout the winter of 2001, the daily Folha de São Paulo alleged that Pelé had skimmed $700,000 from a charity match that his company Pelé Sports Marketing had organized for UNICEF, set to be played in Buenos Aires. It was a scheme that involved two shell companies. In

  response, Pelé pleaded ignorance. He passed blame onto his business partner of twenty years, firing him, then suing him, and dissolving Pelé Sports Marketing.

  His anger, however, didn’t lead him to return the $700,000.

  When I asked Pelé’s friends about his ethical mis-steps, they o¤ered several excuses. Some say that Pelé’s impoverished upbringing has made him crazy for money. But they say it’s also something a bit more sweet than that, too. When people help him, even unctuous ones, he remains willfully oblivious to their shortcomings.

  He forgives their mistakes until it’s no longer socially acceptable for him to forgive. It’s not far from the sociologist Edward Banfield’s famous 1958 study of corruption, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society. Banfield explained that it’s the most familial-based societies, where the sense of obligation is strongest, that breed the worst nepotism and cronyism. In other words, Pelé, and Brazil, weren’t just ill-suited for reform. They were ill-suited for capitalism. Pelé could rake in profits. But as much as he told himself that he’d learned to make the cold calculations of the market, he couldn’t.

  VI.

  A few critics ascribe dark motives to the foreign investors.

  They accuse them of using the clubs to launder money and cover other shady dealings. And, in some cases, there may be truth to this allegation. But most of the foreign investors had arrived in Brazil with a utopian glint in their eyes. All it would take to transform soccer, they theorized, was a bit of transparency, the modern magic of marketing, and exploitation of synergies. They spoke of turning the game into a slick, profitable spectacle—complete with skyboxes and lucrative television contracts. Hicks, Muse of Dallas had even begun the Pan-American Sports Network to televise its teams’ games. It was an ambitious plan, and it might have worked had they torn the teams away from cartolas like Eurico Miranda. HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE SURVIVAL OF THE TOP HATS

  Miranda invites me to São Januário on the morning after the club’s 104th birthday. The night before there had been a gala celebration on the Rio oceanfront. This morning, he’s holding a press conference to announce the signing of a highly regarded Serbian émigré named Dejan Petkovic. The celebration the night before, he says, has motivated him “to shake things up.” But there’s another reason he needs Petkovic. Vasco has had a less than stellar start to the season. By occupying a position near the bottom of the league table, Vasco has threatened Miranda’s reelection bid. In the parl-ance of American political science, the team’s poor performance threatens to depress the turnout of Eurico’s base. Petkovic is a piece of political pork, a last-minute move to reenergize the club’s supporters.

  Miranda does little to conceal his ulterior motives.

  At the press conference, his aides place three burly guys in back of the bank of microphones. Moments before Miranda appears with Petkovic, when the television cameras will turn o
n, an aide hands the burly men T-shirts with Eurico’s name and campaign logo. As journalists enter the press conference, held in the stadium’s “presidential conference room,” one of

  Miranda’s lackeys o¤ers them a campaign bumper sticker. He screams at a cameraman, “It’s not right to wear Bermuda shorts in the oªce of the president.”

  In Brazil, Miranda is a familiar figure: the populist.

  Despite advances toward democracy, his archetype flourishes. These unabashed crooks have no compunction about pocketing money devoted to school lunch programs and steering massive contracts to their family business. But the populists have mastered a few good tricks that make them popular: While they steal for themselves, they also know how to steal for their constituents, pushing money into ostentatious public works projects. It’s a style that has been reduced to a common aphorism used to justify support for them,

  “He steals but he makes.”

  Miranda enters the press conference. He wears a gold necklace. He has well-oiled hair. One of his longtime critics tells me that about twenty years ago he was a beautiful man. While the beauty may have faded, he still carries himself as if displaying his specimen. Even while Petkovic responds to questions, Miranda

  demands attention. He sits down in a chair and leans back, proudly exhibiting his corpulence. During the press conference, he smokes a sizeable cigar, rolling it between his fingers as he takes long, hard pu¤s. It becomes impossible not to stare.

  One of the defining characteristics of the Brazilian populist is his pugilism. In a sense, their appeal depends on being perceived as embattled rebels, painting their accusers as uncaring elites. Miranda likes a good fight, too. When Rio’s evangelical governor Anthony Garotinho canceled a Vasco match after its stadium disaster, Miranda called him a “weak-kneed” “fag-got” “who sat there o¤ering false prayers to Jesus.”

  After a referee sent o¤ three Vasco players in a 1999

  game, Miranda stormed onto the field, leading a stam-pede of his security entourage. Before Miranda could slug the referee, police intervened.

  During the Petkovic press conference, Miranda has no compunction about summarily interrupting journalists. “That’s a stupid question,” he says repeatedly. HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE SURVIVAL OF THE TOP HATS

  Miranda moves a hand in a circular motion, the same one used by a coach to signal a change of players. Fearful perhaps of one of Miranda’s verbal rampages, the journalists comply. By the time Miranda finishes his press conference and sits down to talk, I’m a bit fearful too.

  I’ve met many fans of Vasco da Gama, sensible people who disdain corruption but adore Miranda. “He may be a bastard, but he’s my bastard” is the classic refrain. Like most strongmen, he can’t distinguish between the club’s interest and his own—the father figure protecting Vasco from the slings and arrows of a wicked world. He’s especially hard on the foreign investors, whom he accuses of trying to destroy his club.

  “All of a sudden, foreign investors came here and they tried to change this into a thing that they call business.

  Due to the cultural practices that we have here, they faced several diªculties. Because this approach was not the right one. They came with an objective: Let’s take care of the bottom line. Business is that. But that way simply doesn’t work here. There are local practices that must be observed. They do know business but they know nothing about our culture, about our local characteristics.”

  This is highly disingenuous, to say the least.

  Miranda cut the deal with NationsBank, inviting them into his club. The bank never had anywhere the influence over the club that he alleges. But his use of this rhetoric is incontestably masterful. He’s maintained his political base for so long because he’s tapped into a powerful line of argument.

  Sitting across a conference room table, twirling in his chair, Miranda tells me, “Vasco’s a club of immigrants. It was founded by Portuguese and Brazilians. And Vasco’s the only club that has some history. Vasco had the first black player in history. Football was practiced by elites. This is the only club where the associates bought every inch of land with no help from the government. None. It’s a pioneer club.” Miranda argues that the multinationals will inevitably eviscerate these traditions. The foreign investors will bring in guys

  “who barely speak Portuguese.” In the interest of profit, the foreign investors will try to market the clubs to the widest possible audience. At Palmeiras, the Italian multinational Parmalat changed the team colors. At Corinthians and Flamengo, the foreign investors sold star players to hated cross-town rivals—previously an unthinkable act. Everywhere they went they bragged about their marketing plans. Miranda is trying to argue that foreigners created the impression that clubs are just businesses, not repositories of tradition and superior morality. Miranda’s genius was that he only began making these anti-globalization arguments after he robbed the foreign investors blind.

  With the departure of foreign investors, Miranda doesn’t have any compelling scapegoat that he can flog to distract from his own failings. He campaigns for reelection in the shadow of an atrocious season. Now he doesn’t watch games from the honor tribunal, a box at midfield where team presidents traditionally sit. He watches from his own oªce, which overlooks the pitch, behind dark glass.

  Just after visiting with Miranda, I met with an aging ex-Olympic volleyball player named Fernandão. He leads the underground anti-Miranda group, the

  Moviemento Unido Vascainos. It’s underground, because HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE SURVIVAL OF THE TOP HATS

  Miranda has thrown Fernandão and his friends out of the club. Today, they buy anti-Miranda billboards near São Januario. They hand out leaflets to Vascainos on their way to watch games at the stadium. Fernandão tells me that the wealth from the NationsBank deal has made Miranda “drunk with power.”

  A few months later, Fernandão’s assessment is borne out. Miranda shows up at the polls with two armed bodyguards. He insists on cutting in front of long lines of voters. Along the way, he pauses to verbally assault a woman reporter. It was too much, even for supporters of Vasco. At the polling place, a revolt begins. Voters start chanting “ladrão,” thief. By the end of the day, the unthinkable had happened. Miranda had lost, not just his seat in congress, but the parliamentary immunity that came with the seat. The federal prosecutors have been waiting for this day. They have been sitting on a thirty-seven page memo listing Miranda’s crimes. After defeating the foreign investors, he is now himself defeated.

  With foreign investors out of Brazil, the leading proponent of soccer capitalism became the sports minister, a lifelong technocrat and old friend of President Cardoso called José Luis Portella. He invited me to watch his weekly soccer game, played in a field in northern São Paulo. The players in his league are, by rule, all at least forty-five years old. Portella is a short man, without obvious soccer gifts. He couldn’t be further from Pelé, whose old ministry he now occupies. But he’s not nearly as physically challenged as some of his teammates. A few are so rotund—diet and fitness have no place in Brazilian masculinity—that they don’t ever run for longer than five seconds at a stretch. Several of Portella’s teammates are in their mid-sixties. These limitations, however, do little to deter Portella and his teammates from treating the game with the utmost seriousness.

  The teams have coaches who pace the sidelines cursing their lack of e¤ort and stray passes. They’ve hired a referee who just retired from administering games in the top Brazilian league. Despite the referee’s experience, the players argue with him as much as any group of professionals, if not more. By the end of the first half, the sports minister himself has received a yellow card for screaming in the referee’s face.

  When Portella and I sit down, he doesn’t hide his pessimism about the future of the game. Not even the indictment of Eurico Miranda, he says, would alleviate soccer’s deep crisis. But watching Portella play, he undermines his own argument. Even this group of unfit men plays stylishly. They use spin
to pass the ball in entirely unexpected directions, shoot with the back of their heals, and showboat their dribbling skills.

  Despite the persistence of corruption, Brazil’s mania for soccer has hardly abated; its natural soccer resources don’t seem close to exhausted. It’s too essential a part of the national character. As Portella’s team scores, the middle-aged men kiss the club’s insignia on their jerseys and kiss one another; they tumble into a heap on the field. Even among Brazil’s accountants, taxi drivers, and government technocrats, there are moments that make you want to get down on your knees and give thanks to Our Lady of Victories. o

  H o w S o c c e r E x p l a i n s

  t h e B l a c k C a r p a t h i a n s

  I.

  Edward Anyamkyegh disembarked at Lviv Interna-

  tional Airport in the Ukraine precisely ten years into postcommunism. Hints of the old regime could still be detected in the small building. A fading frieze paid tribute to heroic workers carrying their metal tools like swords. Police in brown military hats with large swooping crowns, the kind that used to populate Kremlin Square parades, stared self-importantly at arrivals.

  Because they were trained to be suspicious of visitors, and because Edward looked so di¤erent, the police pulled him aside. Why have you come to the Ukraine?

  The sight of Edward Anyamkyegh in 2001 may have shocked the police. But in those days, the exhausted end of an era of rapid globalization, his arrival shouldn’t have been so disconcerting. It could even be described as one sign of the fading times. In that epoch, strange cultural alchemies had proliferated: Eastern Europeans harvesting Tuscan olive groves; Bengalis answering customer service calls for Delaware credit card companies; and, as in the case of Edward Anyamkyegh, Nigerians playing professional soccer in the Ukraine.

  Around the time of Edward’s arrival, Nigerians had become a Ukrainian fad. Within a few months, nine Nigerians were signed to play in Ukraine’s premier league. They were the most prestigious purchases a club could make. A roster devoid of Nigerians wasn’t considered a serious roster; an owner who didn’t buy Nigerians wasn’t an ambitious owner.