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 attracted 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.
