How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization (15 page)

two circles around a Senegalese keeper, the eight goals he put past a top Rio club in a single game—it doesn’t exist on film, only in fading memories and folklore.

The lure of the Maracanã’s mythic past is so strong that three of Rio’s four teams have made it their home stadium. On a perfect August night at the beginning of a new season, I came to watch one of these storied clubs, Botafogo. I had expected one of the great sporting experiences. And the entrance didn’t disappoint.

You walk past a stretch of polished granite sidewalk, like the one in front of Mann’s Chinese Theater, with blocks dedicated to Brazil’s greatest players, coaches, and sportswriters. Well before the portal to the arena it is possible to hear the samba cadence of the drums.

The chants and drumbeat originate in a corner of the arena, just to the side of the goal. This is the
curva,
as the Italians call it. Across much of the Latin world, the
curva
is the traditional congregation of the exuberant clubs of supporters. They vigorously wave flags, at least ten feet tall, with slogans expressing undying allegiance to their beloved team. They spend all week composing new songs that they will use to taunt their opponent and champion their favorite players.

The Maracanã provides all the emotion that a fan could desire, except for one thing: company. Aside from the diehards in the
curva,
and a few dozen fans accompanying the visiting team who’ve been

sequestered in their own distant
curva,
for safety’s sake, there’s almost no one in the vast stadium. When the public address announcer lists the names of players, the echo in the stadium renders him incomprehensible. According to the figure thrown up on the score-
board, a measly 4,000 have shown. This number is

sadly typical: thousands more fans attend the average soccer game in Columbus, Ohio, and Dallas, Texas, than in the top flight of the Brazilian league.

After one spends a little time in Rio, the reasons for this sparseness become obvious. Ubiquitous surveillance cameras have largely stamped out the thievery that used to lurk through the stadium, but the surrounding neighborhood is a shooting gallery. Trips to the bathroom mean splashing through pools of urine.

Often enough, the stench is apparent outside the bathrooms, too. Many Brazilian fans don’t want to risk missing any action on the pitch by making the long haul to the head. Maracanã recently renovated its infrastructure, not just to comply with new safety regulations, but also to reverse the corrosive e¤ects of urine on steel-reinforced concrete girders.

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 on, 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.”