In Latin America the border between football and politics is vague. There is a long list of governments that have fallen over or been overthrown after the defeat of the national team
Luis Suarez
Brazil is a country where football is taken more seriously than probably anywhere else in the world. There are other countries, where “the beautiful game” also has its very place in society (and most of them are located either South of the US river called Rio Grande, or are strayed over the other continents except Oceania), but in none of them football is a real matter of life or death. Bill Shankly’s words are to be taken literally in this country. After the political president, the chairman of the national football association, the Confederacao Brasileira de Futebol (CBF), is probably the most powerful and influential position in Brazilian society. Locally powerful and influential persons and families exist everywhere, but nationwide accepted there are only a few and very rarely they are bound to an (officially) unpaid position.
Corruption has a long tradition in Brazil, dating back to the colonization days already, and football is no extemption from that. When Charles Miller brought the first footballs from England to Brazil with him in 1894, he also infected the whole country with a fever that would be uncurable. As Brazil has its long distances, regional and state championships were played, but there was no national championship until 1971, because of the long distances that the teams would have had to travel mainly by bus, as airtravel was completely underdeveloped. But the Confederacao Brasileira de Desportos (CBD), the predecessor of the CBF, had its plans for a national championship for quite a while already. Founded in 1914 as Federacao Brasileira de Sports (FBS) its mission was to support and organise the practise of sports in the entire country. When in 1958, Fluminense Football Club member, lawyer, ex-athlete, chairman of Rio’s Metropolitan Swimming Federation, main shareholder of the Viacao Cometa bus company and CEO of that respective company, Jean Marie Faustin Goedefroid Havelange, better known as Joao Havelange, took over CBD’s presidential chair, an era of the combination of corruption, sports and politics would start, an epoch which lasts until today. CBD was governing 24 different kinds of sports at that time, but football was starting to dominate an in 1979 it renamed itself to CBF and left the other sports to other governing bodies.
When the military couped in 1964, they were keen on increasing their popularity among the population and they signed a deal with CBF, or better said with Mr Havelange, to invest money in the national passion either with direct infrastructure improvements like football statiums, or with giving money to the federation in order to use it on specific projects. Brazil underwent one of the most brutal and inhuman periods during the military dictatoship under the reign of Emilio Garrastazu Medici (1969 – 1974) during which most of the official 333 victims of the dictatorship period were either killed or disappeared (the dark number is much higher as many cases went unreported), but the eyes of the world were blinded by the Brazilian miracle and the success of the national football team. At that time, Brazil’s national team was considered to be the strongest in the world and with players like Pele, Jairzinho, Tostao, Rivelino, Gerson, Carlos Alberto etc., they won their third World Cup in 1970. At that time Brazilian players were considered as national treasures and therefore were obliged to play in the country and were not allowed to move anywhere.
The military dictatorship had close ties with Brazil’s leading media company, Rede Globo, and so it was no wonder that Mr Havelange was also a close friend to the Marinho family, the owners of that gratuitous media conglomerate and also one of the secret rulers of Brazil. With the help and the use of that money coming from the military government, Mr Havelange assumed office as FIFA chairman in 1974, a position he would hold until 1998, when he would hand over the office to his successor, another man with big pockets, the Swiss Sepp “I am a mountain goat” Blatter. And as Mr Havelange could not be FIFA and CBD chairman at the same time, CBD was taken over by admiral Heleno de Barros Nunes under whom football seperated itself from the other sports in that organisation and was renamed as CBF, but keeping the same badge as their symbol.
The Havelange influence on CBF continued and it peaked when his son in law, Ricardo Terra Teixeira took over the presidency from Giuliete Coutinho in 1989. That was the time when CBF was in war with the big clubs, which had founded an interest grouping, the Clube dos 13, which formed quite a strong opposition against CBF. Brazilian football at that time was more a mess than it used to be before, with everybody following their particular interests and trying to enforce them by all means, not caring about the game and organisation of the sports as a whole.
Since 1971, CBF organizes the national championship under different names and nowadays it is organized in four divisions with three holding 20 clubs and the fourth tier bearing 68 clubs. Additionally the Brazilian Cup (Copa do Brasil), two divisions of laides football and a national Under 20 championship are organized by it. CBF exploits the national game commercially as much as it can, but the only entity it really cares about is its powerhorse in the world: the national team. The national championship is more or less left to Rede Globo, which dictates the kick off times of the 1st divison matches (and for mid-week matches it is hardly ever before 21:45, as another national passion, the neverending, vacuous telenovelas, needs to be broadcast at prime time to make most money out of it). As Brazilians are mainly interested in the 1st division, the rest is broadcast by smaller TV stations, which are only watched by a minority of the population anyway.
TV is a magic word, because the CBF chairmen Ricardo Teixeira, Marco Polo Del Nero and Jose Maria Marin set up a fraudulent scheme to sell the broadcasting rights of the Copa America championships of the years 2015, 2019, 2023 as well as the centennial competition in 2016. A company called Datisa bought them for approx. 353 million US$, agreeing to pay an additional 110 million US$ in bribes to the chairmen of the South American football federations. By the time this was discovered, Mr Marin had already pocketed 6 million US$ of the to be expected 10 million US$. The Brazilian Cup was sold to the mother company of Datisa, a firm called Traffic, which paid 2 million R$ (approx. 500 000 US$) per year to Mr Marin and two other CBF officials for the TV broadcasting rights.
In 1996, CBF signed a contract with US sportswear manufacturer Nike to be the sole supplier of sports equipment for the national team. It was a 10 years lasting contract worth 160 million US$. The contract included such details as that Brazil would play their friendlies away only, all organised and patronised by Nike (that is how Brazil vs Ghana or Argentina vs. Brazil are played in places like London or Dubai and not in Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires, Rosario or Salvador), or that eight out of the eleven started have to be first team regulars (that is to guarantee that the star players are seen by the public and that they would carry the brands’ name everywhere in the world). From the 40 million US$, which were supposed to be sent by Nike, only 30 million US$ arrived in the bank account of Traffic. The deal was prolonged for another 10 years in 2006 and currently runs out only in 2026. What miracles winning a World Cup in Nike’s homeland can provide……
In September 2005 a refereeing fraud scheme was detected. Edilson Pereira de Carvalho, by then a referee in Brazil’s FIFA ranks, had been paid 10 000 R$ (approx. 2500 Euros) per match to decide in favour of a certain betting mafia. 11 matches had to be replayed, they changed the champion of this year from SC Internacional (from Porto Alegre) to SC Corinthians (from Sao Paulo). Mr Carvalho was arrested and banned for life from any footballing activities. The mentor of the scheme, the Brazilian entreperneur Nagib Fayad, was also arrested and faced several charges for setting up a criminal scheme. By the way, the author had been present in one of these matches, the SPFC vs. Corinthians derby on September 7th, 2005, which was won by SPFC 3-2, and Mr Carvalho was hiding his bias very well, so that the author could no really detect any match fixing. But then, the author had been on the upper tier of Morumbi Stadium among the Torcida Organizada called Gavioes da Fiel, and from a far distance it is always more difficult to spot all the details of a match.
The dissatisfaction with Brazil’s football governing body keeps growing with every case that is detected and the confidence in CBF being an entity that could really supervise and govern Brazil’s very disorganized football schemes is dropping day by day. Brazilians love their game with passion and most of them would do anything to follow their clubs and national team, but the association is doing the best it can to destroy that passion for the future in order to fill the big pockets of their functionaries. Active players, who openly criticize CBF for various obvious nuisances should not count to play ever for their country. CBF wants assimilated, easy to handle players in order to sell a product, the national team. The national championship is rather a feeder league for the national team, whose players play outside of Brazil anyway. By May 17th, 2017, there were 1202 professional players from Brazil, who were playing abroad. That is approximately 10% of all expatriate footballers worldwide. Brazil’s big clubs clubs hook up with small European ones in order to nurture their players in smaller European leagues for the big jump and have their share of the luctrative 5 billion US$ football transfer market in Europe. CBF is not doing anything against this, because all they are interested in are the national team and themselves. Talents are snapped up easily, the domestic league is losing talent and quality, but as long as the big pockets are filled with an everlasting warm rain of bribery money, everything is alright under the Brazilian sun.