How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization

by Franklin Foer

  Only a handful of clubs operate in the vicinity of the black. In 2002, Flamengo of Rio de Janeiro, easily the most popular club in the nation, owed creditors over $100 million, an incomprehensible sum in the stunted Brazilian economy. You can see the signs of decay everywhere. Attending games in some of the country’s most storied stadiums, buying their most expensive tickets, I found myself worrying about splinters and rusty nails protruding from the rotting wooden seats.

  Usually, such woeful conditions are attributable to poverty. The Brazilian game, however, has hardly starved for capital. In fact, there was an international, well-monied venture to raise the Brazilian game to a Western European standard of quality. In 1999, a Dallas-based investment fund called Hicks, Muse, Tate & Furst sank millions into the São Paulo club Corinthians and into the Belo Horizonte club Cruzeiro. ISL, a Swiss sports marketing firm, acquired a share of Flamengo. A few years earlier, the Italian food giant Parmalat began running Palmeiras of São Paulo. These investors came implicitly promising to wipe away the practices of corrupt cartolas and replace them with the ethic of professionalism, the science of modern marketing, and a concern for the balance sheet. “Capitalism is winning out against the feudal attitudes that have prevailed in the sport for too long,” Brazil’s venerable soccer journalist Juca Kfouri crowed at the height of the foreign influx. Newspapers carried their predictions that soccer would generate four percent of Brazil’s gross domestic product within years.

  When the investors talked about exploiting the potential of Brazilian soccer, they wanted to capitalize on a single fact of the game: The Brazilian style is so much more aesthetically pleasing than any other brand of play. In the postwar years, when international competition truly began, Brazil became an international power because it played without the rigid strategic stric-tures of continental soccer. Positions, formations, and defense weren’t valued nearly so much as spontaneity, cleverness, and the scoring of goals. To paraphrase the Italian film director Pier Paolo Pasolini’s formulation, where the European style was prose, the Brazilian was poetry. The Brazilians created a whole new set of conventions for the game: passes with the back of the heel, an array of head and hip fakes, the bicycle kick.

  But while the Brazilian style and some Brazilian players have flourished in the global economy, Brazil has not. Across the world, sport isn’t renowned for its stren-uous ethics. But the cartolas are a special breed. Every HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE SURVIVAL OF THE TOP HATS

  time a rising superstar becomes a fan favorite, he’s sold to Europe. It’s not just the greedy chasing of paychecks.

  A substantial number of Brazilians prefer unglamorous leagues in the Faeroe Islands, Haiti, and Albania to remaining at home. They’re fleeing the capricious rule of the cartolas, who overhaul the rules for the Brazilian championship annually—usually to benefit the most politically powerful clubs. As Ronaldo told reporters in 1998, “I wouldn’t return to Brazil now for any o¤er.”

  Despite their ambitions and resources, foreign investors did nothing to change this. Less than three years after the foreign investors arrived, they left in disgrace. At Corinthians, fans held demonstrations against Hicks, Muse, protesting its failure to deliver on grand promises to buy superstars and build a modern stadium. At Flamengo, ISL collapsed into bankruptcy. Foreign capital hadn’t turned Brazilian soccer into the NBA of global soccer or rid the game of corruption. In fact, by many objective measures, the game is now in worse shape than when they arrived. So this is more than a tragic tale of sporting decline; it’s an example of how the bad parts of globalization can undermine the good ones; this is the story of how corruption beats back liberalization and turns Thomas Friedman on his head.

  III.

  As with any story about Brazilian soccer, there’s a natural place to begin: the king, by which I mean Edson Arantes do Nascimento, by which I mean, of course, Pelé. He’s the natural starting place because he is a cen- tral character in the globalization of Brazilian soccer, and the struggle to salvage the game from the ruinous rule of the cartolas. But he also makes a good starting place, because his biography is the economic history of Brazil.

  It begins in 1940 on the frontier west of Rio, in an impoverished town called Tres Coracoes. With his slight frame (145 pounds at the start of his career), Edson Arantes’s body seemed more suited to shoe shining and the resale of tobacco gathered from discarded cigarettes, his first vocations. But he had a pushy father, Dondinho, whose own aspirations to soccer greatness and social mobility ended with the ripping of right knee ligaments in his first and only professional appearance.

  From the start, it was clear Dondinho had quite a target to push. Despite his physical limitations, Pelé possessed an uncanny ability to shoot from an impossible angle, a manner of handling the ball that looked more like a caress than a dribble, a charismatic style. By dint of fluke injuries to his teammates, at age sixteen, he started for the prestigious Santos Football Club in Brazil’s booming co¤ee port. At age seventeen, in 1958, with a flick over the head of the Swedish keeper Anders Svensson, he clinched his first World Cup.

  Brazil is the bizarro version of the United States.

  It’s the fantastically vast, resource-rich, new-world culture that didn’t become a global hegemon. In Pelé’s prime, the fifties and sixties, Brazil made a self-conscious choice to reverse this condition. First a series of populist presidents (1956–1964), then the military dictatorship (1964–1985), practiced an aggressive brand of forced industrialization and economic nationalism, ratcheting up tari¤s, opening state-run firms, HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE SURVIVAL OF THE TOP HATS

  and ordering public works projects at a furious pace.

  “Fifty years in five” was the Soviet-ish slogan of president Juscelino Kubitschek’s regime in the late fifties and early sixties. The pump had been primed. By end of Kubitschek’s presidency in 1961, the country’s GDP

  was growing at a pace of 11 percent per year.

  Pelé became the regime’s symbol of this boom, what economists called the “Brazilian Miracle”— evidence that Brazil could become an international power on its own terms, without plagiarizing from foreign models.

  By the seventies, the dictators plastered his face across billboards next to their slogans (“No one will hold Brazil back now!”). The military dictators played the theme song of Pelé’s 1970 World Cup winning team at oªcial events. Upon the team’s return to Brazil, President Emilio Médici announced, “I identify this victory won in the brotherhood of good sportsmanship with the rise of faith in our national development.”

  Like his country, Pelé amassed a small fortune. His club, Santos, gave him a $125,000 salary, a Volkswagen, and a house for his parents. He’d become one of the best-paid athletes of his day. But the fortune never made him wealthy. Sycophants plundered his accounts. A Spanish agent called Pepe Gordo, introduced to Pelé in 1965 by a teammate, ran down Pelé’s pile of cash with a string of dunderheaded investments in fly-by-night companies and undesirable real estate. (Instead of breaking with Pepe Gordo, or better yet suing him, Pelé made him the best man at his first wedding.) In another era, he would have quickly recovered his losses by signing with a rich European club. But in 1960, the government declared Pelé a “non-exportable national treasure.” Uneducated and unworldly, he didn’t know better

  and never seemed to assimilate the lessons of his mistakes. So he repeated them. After Pelé retired in 1974, he trusted advisors who made him the unwitting guar-antor of a massive loan that went bad. “Once again, after all the warnings and all the bad experience, I had signed something that I should not have signed,” he wrote in his 1977 memoir. It was a very public humiliation. A year after retiring, amid sentimental goodbyes, he unretired to regain a little bit of his losses. He signed up with the New York Cosmos, a concoction of Warner Communications in the newly minted North American Soccer League, to play three seasons for $7 million.

  His failings mirrored Brazil’s own disastrous mis-cues. Like Pelé, the dictatorship attra
cted rogues who robbed the national treasury. And the mismanagement was worse than that. After the 1973 oil shocks, the military dictatorship insisted on keeping the economy aimed at the same spectacular growth rate. This meant even more state spending, which meant borrowing from foreign banks. Over the decade, the government built a $40 billion debt. This triggered a nightmarish chain—

  unable to get loans, the government could no longer fund industry; unable to fund industry, Brazil was slammed by unemployment. Inflation, sparked by state spending and then worsened by the new debt payments, compounded the poverty of the unemployed. By the end of the military dictatorship in 1985, Brazil su¤ered from the worst case of income inequality in the world.

  For a time in the late ’70s and early ’80s, Pelé’s trajectory diverged from Brazil’s. With the Cosmos, he’d finally flourished financially. He told Time magazine in HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE SURVIVAL OF THE TOP HATS

  2001 that America taught him that “[y]ou can’t do business with members of your family. You can’t appoint someone to be president of your company because he is a friend or your brother. You have to appoint the most capable person. Business is business. You have to be tough.” Put di¤erently, America made him a capitalist.

  In fact, it made him quite a good one. Even after his retirement, as the images of his triumphs faded, his profitability continued on a pace of almost exponential growth. He became the perfectly postmodern image, a brand backed by multinational companies. Pelé’s figure now appears on two million MasterCards; Viagra, Nokia, Samsung, Coca-Cola, and Petrobras have tapped him as their international spokesman. Every year, he reportedly pockets more than $20 million from sponsorships alone.

  It’s tempting to view Pelé, with his up-from-the-favela tale and his terminally a¤able demeanor, as the Brazilian Steppinfetchit, the ideally ino¤ensive corporate spokesman. But this sells Pelé and his ambitions short. He wanted to build his own Brazilian version of Warner Communications. In 1993, Pelé set out to buy the broadcast rights for Brazil’s national championship from the Brazilian Soccer Confederation (CBF). As the man most associated with the success of Brazilian soccer, he felt sure that he would be rewarded for his lifetime of contributions. And to ensure his position, he put cash behind his e¤ort —$1 million more than his near-est competitor. But from his many years as a member of the national team, he should have grasped that market forces don’t exactly govern CBF. One of the federation’s apparatchiks demanded that Pelé send $1 million to a Swiss bank account for the right to have his bid reviewed by CBF. Pelé refused and lost the contract.

  Bitter and humiliated, Pelé set out for revenge. He exposed the bribe in an interview with Playboy. Pelé couldn’t have picked a juicier target. CBF’s president, Ricardo Teixeira, perfectly embodied the decrepitude of the cartolas. An obscure lawyer, without any prior involve-ment in soccer or sports administration, he’d arrived at the highly prized position in the Brazilian game for a perfectly predictable reason: His father-in-law was João Havelange, then the all-powerful head of the international soccer federation. Over his tenure, he acquired increasingly fancy cars, an apartment in Miami, and an entourage of bodyguards. While CBF ran up massive debts, Teixeira’s salary increased by more than 300 percent. Charges of corruption tailed him everywhere.

  Prosecutors busted him cold for tax evasion, although they couldn’t beat out the statute of limitations.

  For the few anti-corruption crusaders, it seemed their savior had finally arrived. Rich beyond imagination, they reasoned, Pelé could a¤ord to speak truth to power. He had, after all, been a corporate mascot with morals, refusing to advertise for cigarettes and alcohol.

  “I only put my name to things I believe in,” he liked to tell reporters. High-mindedness had always been part of Pelé’s persona. When he scored his thousandth goal at Rio’s Maracanã stadium in 1969, reporters rushed to ask his thoughts. He bellowed, “Remember the children, never forget Brazil’s poor children.”

  Pelé’s criticism of Teixeira fit the times. Latin America was in the midst of profound transformation—a broader revolt against corruption. After decades of protectionism and inflation, it was ready to ditch the crony HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE SURVIVAL OF THE TOP HATS

  capitalist style of the military dictators. In its place, it chose (at least its elites chose) neo-liberalism of the Washington school. At the vanguard of the change resided the sociologist Fernando Henrique Cardoso. He made an unlikely capitalist and a charmingly tweedy politician. During the ’70s, he’d written the defining text of the Brazilian left, Dependency and Development in Latin America. His criticisms of the military government earned him interrogations, jail time, the firebombing of his oªce, and sporadic stints in exile.

  But without the military dictatorship as a foil, after the regime’s collapse in 1985, Cardoso became ever less radical. By the time he became president in 1994, he’d emerged as the vital center of Brazilian politics.

  Watching Pelé pick his battle with the crony capitalists at CBF, Cardoso saw a kindred ideological spirit and an opportunity for gamy politics. He named Pelé his Extraordinary Minister of Sports, Brazil’s first-ever black cabinet minister. “A symbol of Brazil that has come up from the roots . . . that has triumphed,” Cardoso crowed as he made the announcement. From the start, it was clear that Pelé had bought into the government’s “modernization” agenda. A year into his term, he proposed the “Pelé Law,” a set of IMF-like reforms for soccer, requiring clubs to operate as transparent capitalist ventures, with open books and accountable managers. It gave players the right to free agency, to abandon their clubs after their contracts ended. His aide Celso Grelet told me, “We thought at the time we’d bring business rationality and professionalism to the clubs.” Pelé hoped the reforms would attract foreign investors who would remake “Brazilian football into the NBA of the footballing world.” In a generation, Pelé had gone from exploited third-world labor to authoritarian icon to neo-liberal acolyte.

  IV.

  Flying into Rio, looking west from the mountaintop Jesus that reigns over the city, you can see the most famous Brazilian building, Maracanã stadium. From the street, staring at its squat steel rim, the Maracanã doesn’t look like it could hold over 200,000 people—

  as it did for the finals of the 1950 World Cup, the largest ever live audience for a soccer game. It doesn’t even rise above its middle-class neighborhood. In the air, however, the magnitude of the Maracanã becomes clear. It’s one big hole in the ground. It seems to have an endless supply of corners into which fans can be shoved. Ringing the field, separated from the action by a deep moat, rows of concrete slabs can accommodate 40,000 fans in addition to the layers of seats above.

  The Maracanã, like a duomo, is filled with memorials to heroes, martyrs, and its patron saint, Pelé. It was here that he scored his thousandth goal on November 19, 1969. And it was here, in 1961, as a plaque at the stadium’s entrance commemorates, that Pelé scored

  “the most beautiful goal ever.” Collecting the ball in front of his own keeper, he traversed the length of the field. Without a pass, but many feints at passing, he juked his way past six separate defenders. The ball never really left his feet until he put it in the net. Like much of Pelé’s highlight reel—the time he dribbled HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE SURVIVAL OF THE TOP HATS

  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.