When Eurico Miranda joined Vasco’s management
in 1975, in his early thirties, he’d been a man of limited means. The son of a Portuguese baker, he’d worked as a salesman at a Rio Volkswagen dealership. But with his charisma, he quickly politicked his way up the Vasco hierarchy. It changed his life. He acquired ocean-side houses in Rio and a yacht. This is not a tale of wealth earned with up-by-the-bootstraps industry. By now, the Brazilian press and a congressional investigation have documented Miranda’s o¤enses. In 1998, Vasco received $34 million in cash from NationsBank (now Bank of America), eager to establish a name for itself in the vast Brazilian market by sponsoring a popular sporting brand. When the bank signed the deal, it announced that the cash would last the club for 100
years. Within two, however, this supply had more or less vanished. Approximately $124,000 worth had gone to buy T-shirts and propaganda for Eurico Miranda’s last election campaign. Twelve million went to four accounts of a Bahamas company called Liberal Banking Corporation Limited. As it turned out, the company was very liberal. Any legal representative of Vasco could withdraw the money. According to a report published by the Brazilian senate, the withdrawn money ended up as payments to Miranda’s car dealer, business investments, credit card company, brother, and Internet provider. “It is clear,” the senate concluded, “Mr. Miranda has diverted to his accounts money that belonged to Vasco.”
Miranda hadn’t covered his trail very carefully. He didn’t need to. As long as he held on to his congressional seat, parliamentary immunity protected him from prosecution. With the support of Vasco’s many voting fans, he looked like he could hang on forever.
But because Miranda squandered the Bank of America investment, Vasco has slid into debt and mediocrity.
In 1998, it won the Latin American championship, the Copa Libertadores. Three years later, the club owed its star player Romario $6.6 million in back wages. Worse than that, to keep enough players on the pitch, Romario reportedly had to dig into his own accounts to cover the weekly paychecks of his teammates. Desperate for extra cash, Vasco packed fans into São Januário for big games.
In the last game of 2000, Vasco management crammed in more than 12,000 over the maximum seating capacity. After a brawl ignited in the stands, fans began fleeing and then falling on one another. They cascaded toward the pitch, their downward flow stanched only by a rusty fence. When the fence collapsed, the crowd came tumbling down onto the field. There were 168 casual-HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE SURVIVAL OF THE TOP HATS
ties. Any decent person would have canceled the match as soon as the injured bodies began stacking on the pitch and helicopters hauled them away. Miranda insisted that the game go on.
II.
Based on the stylishness of Brazil’s 2002 World Cup triumph—Edmilson springing backwards, catapult-like, into a poster-quality bicycle kick; Ronaldo scoring in-stride with a poke of the toe—you’d have no conception of the crisis in the national passion. But Brazilian soccer couldn’t be in a sorrier state—no more corrupt, no more discouraging to fans, no more unappealing to investors.
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
