Futebol

by Alex Bellos

  Ronaldo is looking very smart in a light-coloured suit and plain blue tie. I need to pinch myself to remind myself of the absurdity of the situation. Here is the world's most famous football player, still only aged twenty-four, having to explain to his own parliament why he lost a football match.

  The session starts and the atmosphere is tense. Aldo, explaining the formalities, tells Ronaldo he has a maximum of twenty minutes to state his case before answering questions.

  Ronoldo and Aldo Rebelo in Congress

  Ronaldo, grinning, looks at the empty bench in front of him and says: 'Do I, as a witness, have the right to a glass of water?' It's a perfect opener. His cheeky charm wins over his audience immediately.

  Ronaldo is smooth and well-prepared. He takes the deputies through 12 July 1998. He had lunch and went to bed for a rest. When he woke up, at about 5pm, he joined his team-mates for the afternoon snack. Leonardo started to tell him that there are more important things in life than a game of football. He did not understand why Leonardo was telling him this. It was only revealed to him after the snack, when the doctors told him that he had suffered from a mysterious fit.

  One deputy probes the Zagallo cover-up. He asks if the coach had gone to see him fifteen minutes or three hours after his fit. The deputy camps up his delivery, like he is asking if Colonel Mustard left the lead piping in the conservatory or in the kitchen.

  Ronaldo replies confidently: 'I think at that moment there were more important things to know than if Zagallo had gone to see me or not.' His answer kills that line of enquiry stone dead. The Zagallo cover-up is a red herring.

  There is a comic lack of coherence to some of the questioning. Deputy Eduardo Campos asks: 'In the national team's tactical scheme, you had a role . . . This is fact, it was reported at the time in some newspapers, you had a role in marking Zidane . . . or is this . . .'

  'Who did? I had a role?' asks Ronaldo.

  'Yes. In the tactical scheme, in marking Zidane?'

  'Is this really going to help . . . for the CPI?' Ronaldo protests.

  'It will. I think it will. Otherwise I wouldn't have asked.'

  'OK. I can't remember about Zidane's marker, who had to mark him.'

  'You don't remember?'

  'You mean at the moment of the goal . . .'

  'No,' says the deputy. 'Not at the moment of the goal.'

  Ronaldo carries on: '. . . or during the game?'

  'During the game.'

  'Ah, I don't remember who had to mark . . . Zidane. I also think that whoever should have marked him didn't mark him very well, right?'

  Deputy Eduardo Campos jokes back: 'Because two went in, yeah?'

  Ronaldo agrees: 'Yeah, right.' The chamber laughs, it seems to me, in nervous relief.

  The purpose of the investigation is the Nike-CBF contract. Ronaldo is asked about his own contract with Nike. He says he cannot talk about it because he signed a secrecy clause. The deputies say that he is legally obliged to by the statutes of the hearing.

  'I'm not here to defend Nike or the CBF, but I also have my own opinion,' says Ronaldo, now slightly irritated. 'I'm here to try to clarify things and to give my opinion if need be. But . . . I have no doubt that Nike is serious . . . Sincerely, if I was Nike I wouldn't think twice about taking this contract, ripping it up and leaving Brazil, because of all these problems. Because I can't remember in the history of Brazilian football a contract to help Brazilian football grow . . . I can't remember a contract that has had such a big interest from such an important business for Brazilian football. So, the relation that I have with Nike is a very good one, because it really never demanded anything of me, apart from using its boots during games, which is the least I could do, and, preferably, score a few goals with their boots. That's the only thing that Nike have ever asked me for.'

  As the hearing draws to a close, several deputies make sycophantic remarks. 'I hope that you get back to playing as soon as possible,' says Sérgio Reis, referring to a knee injury that has kept him out of action for about two years. 'And a request by a fan of the Ruby-and-Black Nation that, when you come back, perhaps you return to our dear Flamengo.'

  Deputy Ronaldo Vasconcellos says that Ronaldo's cautious answers are making him more like a defender than a striker.

  The footballer disagrees.

  Deputy Ronaldo Vasconcellos apologises: 'OK. I don't want to make you feel uncomfortable. Dear Ronaldo, people say a lot of things. Now I want to ask you in an objective manner. I know it's not easy putting it down in a few minutes or seconds: Why, in the opinion of the athlete Ronaldo, did Brazil not win the World Cup in France?'

  Ronaldo loses his patience: 'Why didn't we win? Because we let in three goals, because we lost, because . . . I don't know. In football – not just in football, but in sport – you win and you lose. How many times has Brazil won? And no one asked why, or a few people asked, why we won. But you win and you lose. We lost. Be patient. Just because we lost are we going to invent a bunch of mysteries, invent a bunch of stuff?'

  'A destiny?' suggests Deputy Ronaldo Vasconcellos.

  'Probably,' says Ronaldo.

  'Good health to you, sir,' says the deputy, and he switches off his microphone.*

  After the defeat against Cameroon, it is thought that the national team has reached rock bottom. Yet the Olympic debacle is merely a sign of humiliations to come. First, the CBF cannot find a coach willing to replace Luxemburgo. After three weeks under a caretaker, Candinho, it offers the job to the former national goalkeeper Emerson Leao. He continues the downward slide, acquiring a knack for losing to teams which have never previously beaten Brazil-Ecuador, in a World Cup qualifier, and Australia, in the third place play-off of the Confederations Cup. Leao's woeful reign has a correspondingly ignominous end: dismissal in the departure lounge of Tokyo airport. Luiz Felipe Scolari takes over on a wave of popular support-the fourth coach in nine months. Brazil fly to the 2001 Copa America in Colombia with renewed hope. Yet they have further to fall. Scolari's men are knocked out by Honduras. Honduras?

  Meanwhile, the CPIs are revealing almost comic levels of corruption and incompetence. Hardly a day passes without new accusations. For months the sports pages of Brazilian newspapers look more like the crime pages. The parliamentary investigations are a fitting backdrop for the striking decline of the national team. It is impossible not to see them as influencing each other. The worse the team performs, the more the investigations gather steam. The more dirt the investigations uncover, the more demoralised the team becomes. How can footballers wear the national shirt with pride, or supporters cheer them on, if national football is being revealed as rotten to the core? Brazilian football, for the time being, is set on a vicious circle of self-destruction.

  In the Senate, Renata Alves's testimony does not disappoint. She says that there used to be a house in Rio nicknamed the 'embassy', where coaches, agents, club directors and members of the CBF met to do deals, pay commissions and even fix matches. She says that Luxemburgo would take money in cash dollars stuffed in a 007-style briefcase. The CPI also receives a fax in which Renata claims that before he went on international flights, Luxemburgo would fill footballs with 'a white powder similar to the drug known as cocaine'. Luxemburgo denies the allegations, and counters the attack by saying that Renata is using the fax as extortion.

  The president of the Minas Gerais Football Federation, Elmer Guilherme Ferreira, is questioned about nepotism. He replies that he 'tries to surround himself with people he can trust'. The Minas Gerais Football Federation is revealed to employ twenty-seven of Elmer's relatives, including brothers, cousins, nephews, uncles and his father.

  In the House of Deputies, Aldo is casting his net wider than the Nike-CBF contract and has begun to examine the broader issue of commercialisation in football. His CPI, in fact, is becoming the football equivalent of the Untouchables. A delegation flies to Europe to investigate the trafficking of underage players and false passports. They bring back Fabio Faria dos Santos, a sixtee
n-year-old, who gives moving evidence. He says that he was taken to Belgium by an agent on the promise that he would get a false passport and be negotiated to a team within a fortnight. He was abandoned by the agent and lived clandestinely for eight months, only surviving thanks to handouts from a family of Brazilians he was lucky enough to meet.

  Aldo also travels. In Maranhao, a poor state in the northeast, he orders the arrest of the vice-president of the state football federation, who is accused of having a stack of forged birth certificates at his home. It is common in Brazil to adulterate ages because younger players can be sold for more money. A footballer with a false age is called a 'gato' – a cat. Aldo discovers a 'supercat' – Rosenilton Torres, who was transferred to Belgium with a document saying he was seven years younger than he is. Aldo describes Maranhao as a 'cat factory' for the ease and frequency of adulterated birth certificates. One tiny club, Americano, sold a hundred players abroad in five years. Americano do not even dispute the state championship, claiming lack of funds.

  The picture that is emerging of Brazilian football is that it is a vast, unregulated bazaar of bartering players for personal gain. A modern day slavery – a scramble to sign up the 'rights' to promising youngsters and then make money by selling them to the highest bidder. While a few cartolas and agents are becoming very rich, most clubs are left destitute, most players are impoverished, and the 'beautiful game' lies on the operating table.

  (I use the term 'slavery' with reason. Once in Florianópolis I met with Vidomar Porto, who used to be the night watchman at local club Avai. Vidomar, aged forty-five, was not paid his wages so he sued his employer. The court ordered Avai to pay up. Only the club was broke. Its only liquid asset was its striker, Claudiomir. So the judge ordered that Claudiomir become Vidomar's property.

  But what could a night watchman do with a striker? Vidomar wanted money. So he decided to sell him to another team. 'I telephoned Claudiomir,' Vidomar told me. 'He accepted it well. He knew I didn't have anything against him. We were friends just like we were before.' The pair, accompanied by Vidomar's lawyer, Waldemar Justino, drove up the coast to sell him to Joinville, a rival club.)

  Little thought is given to investment on football infrastructure, education or development. There are some exceptions. In Salvador, Unicef runs a one-off scheme that gives 'citizenship' lessons to Vitória's junior teams. Ruy Pavan, the coordinator, says that players are taught about workers' rights, black pride and gender issues. 'The majority of players are poor and black. They are very exposed and not always prepared.' He adds that the teenagers enjoy the classes but are more interested in practical advice. 'They have had such wretched upbringings that they often do not know how to run a bath.'

  Several European clubs have links with Brazil. The most directly involved is Internazionale of Milan, which funds football training centres in eight states. They provide sporting materials and teachers for 5,600 nine-to thirteen-year-olds. Children attending these centres, if they are any good, are then attached to Brazilian clubs and when they become adults Inter have first refusal on signing them as pros. It is philanthropic, but does nothing to stop the drain of good players abroad.

  In Maceió I visit a club that has very efficiently turned football into an export commodity. Corinthians Alagoano, named after the São Paulo club, was founded in 1991. Four years later the club made its debut in the second division of the Alagoas state league, one of the minor state leagues. Corinthians won promotion in its first year, but abdicated its right to play in division one. Its president, João Feijo, explained that his players were like baby crabs – he wanted to fatten them in the second division and sell them at maximum profit. In the first division, the costs were too high.

  After topping the second division again in 1997, Corinthians were unable to avoid the misfortune of promotion, and have played in the first division since 1998.1 arrive at their administrative offices, one block from the beach. The building looks more like an insurance broker's than a football club. There is a yellow sofa in reception, a pool out the back and bright-coloured modern art hanging on the walls. The club has no fans nor state titles, yet it is the richest in town.

  I am handed a press release, which tells me that the club's principal objective is to 'discover players and launch them in Brazilian and international football'. It includes a list of fifteen players it claims it has produced – five play in Portugal, two in Japan and one each in Italy, Turkey and Russia. Not bad going for a team that is not even ten years old. And not bad too considering Maceió is a football backwater.

  Fernando Aguiar, the club's director of football, takes me upstairs. We pass a cabinet full of trophies. He leads me into the Marketing Room. Through the back, like a secret chamber, there is a professional video-editing suite. I am told that every player in the Corinthians squad is made his own 'showreel', compiled with his best performances. Each video is recorded twice – once in Portuguese and once in English.

  Fernando explains that the market price for a Brazilian goes up and down depending on the performances of the national team. 'Foreign clubs assume that the best Brazilians play for their country,' he says. 'So if the best players are playing badly, then they assume that the others must be even worse.' After the 1994 World Cup, business boomed. Now, with Brazilian football in crisis, Corinthians' trade is down.

  One anecdote concerning Corinthians' president, João Feijo, reinforces just how businesslike the club is run. An old school friend bumped into him and said: 'João, there's this fantastic kid who plays kickabouts near where I live-you should take a look at him.'

  João Feijo immediately took out his laptop and typed in the child's name. After a few seconds he said: 'No. He's no good. I have a list of all the best young players in the state and he isn't one of them.'

  In its colonial period, Brazil's rural structure was based on huge estates, or 'latifundos', where typically only one crop was grown – such as sugar, cocoa or coffee. Latifundos were based on slavery and upheld the local oligarchies.

  Even though there has been some change to break up large properties and diversify crops, in the poorer parts of the country the latifundo system survives almost intact. The first time I came to Alagoas, in 1999,1 visited a sugar estate four times the size of Manhattan. It had a population of 10,000 and, like a postcard from a forgotten world, a private steam railway with a 1920s English locomotive. Most of the estate's inhabitants cut the cane with their hands and were earning about £10 for a seven-day week. Not slavery, but almost.

  The CBF entrance

  My research into the commercialisation of football was reminding me of the latifundios. Brazil is the world's largest exporter of sugar, coffee and footballers. I began to see the country like a big estate where the agricultural product is 'futebol'. The country is a sporting monoculture. And football mirrors the old hierarchies. The oligarchic powers are sustained by those at the bottom, who like the cane-cutters, live on almost nothing.

  The offices of the Brazilian Football Confederation, the CBF, are situated in the Rua da Alfandega, a narrow side street in the centre of Rio. The frontage looks like the back-entrance to a block of flats. The door is a metal grille. Behind it sits a grumpy man who could be the janitor. His cubby-hole is lit by a neon horseshoe lamp on the ceiling. There is neither a welcome sign nor a plaque. The only way of knowing you are at the headquarters of the most glamorous football team in the world is three CBF crests in the gate and a battered CBF doormat. The entrance is so nondescript and run-down, in fact, that when Luiz Felipe Scolari went there for the first time after being made national coach he could not find it and had to be shown the way by journalists.

  At the beginning of my research I visited the CBF library. I arrived at the offices and the janitor buzzed me in. I waited for several minutes as he chatted to a friend on the telephone, showing no concern in attending to me. He then told me to go upstairs. I took the lift and got out at the third floor. Behind a green metal door was a medium-sized room that looked like a second-hand
bookshop. Along one wall shelves were clumsily stacked with books and files. In a corner sat the librarian, wearing a grey tanktop, maroon tie and a pair of glasses connected round the back of his head by string.

  He looked up at me and pointed to a table, which was covered in books, papers, a small tree of garlic cloves, paper clips, a stapler and a packet of pork scratchings.

  'Sit down there and research,' he barked, as if he was a prison warder and I a new internee.

  I read a sign on the wall: 'If possible, please do not smoke.' If possible?

  The CBF library was almost useless. The book collection was neither comprehensive nor catalogued. It was also difficult to concentrate since the librarian was listening to his radio at full volume.

  I remember wondering at the time where all the CBF's Nike money had gone, since it had obviously not been spent on sprucing up their offices. Or on training personnel in the art of good manners. If I had wanted any proof that the CBF was run – at least superficially – like the worst type of state firm, then I had found it on my first day out.

  Within Brazil, the CBF is seen in much the same way as all authority; untrustworthy, incompetent and corrupt. Its international nadir came at about 9pm on 19 December 1983. Two men entered the Rua da Alfandega offices. They bound, gagged and blindfolded the night watchman and took the lift to the ninth floor – where the Jules Rimet Cup was kept.

  The World Cup's gold trophy had been given to Brazil for keeps after they won the tournament, in 1970, for the third time. To safeguard the prize, the CBF owned a replica cup and had a cabinet fronted with bullet-proof glass. Yet in its wisdom, the CBF kept the replica hidden in a cupboard and the bullet-proof cabinet was nailed into the wall – which meant that any half-brained thief only needed a crowbar to prise it open from the back. The robbery lasted twenty minutes and the Jules Rimet Cup was never seen again.

  (Four people were eventually convicted for their part in the crime, although the details of what happened are still unclear. It is understood that the cup, made of 1.8kg of gold, was sawn into pieces and melted down into bars.)