They’d joined together, in Pelé’s words, in a “pact to save Brazilian soccer.” Teixeira announced that Pelé would head a special commission charged with reorganizing the administration of the sport. He then kissed the king’s ring. “I made a huge mistake by distancing myself from the nation’s greatest idol. I am acknowledging my remorse and am counting on Pelé’s nobility to accept my apologies.” Then, in front of the cameras, for the front pages of the papers, Teixeira and Pelé embraced.
In truth, nothing could have further undermined Pelé’s nobility. No longer was he the scourge of the cartolas. At the conference, he condemned the congressional investigation for destroying the prestige of the national game. He’d given Teixeira credibility at the moment congress was ready to drive the stake into the cartolas. José Trajano, a columnist for the sports daily Lance!, thundered, “The union of Pelé and Ricardo Teixeira is the biggest stab in the back that those of us fighting for ethics in sport could receive. . . . He has sold his soul to the devil.” HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE SURVIVAL OF THE TOP HATS
After the embrace, anti-corruption crusaders turned on Pelé. Reform-minded journalists began reconsidering Pelé’s tenure as sports minister. In retrospect, it was obvious that he had been less than idealistic. Pelé’s business partner had written the bulk of the Pelé Laws. At the same time Pelé’s business associates wrote the laws, they freely admitted that they hoped to profit from them.
Pelé had displayed a troubling lack of ethical common sense in other ways, too. He’d advised foreign investors to direct their money into some of the most corrupt enterprises in Brazil. In 1998, for example, he helped broker the relationship between Eurico Miranda and NationsBank.
Suddenly, the icon had become ripe for a takedown.
Some of the allegations were meaningless tabloid grist: The newsmagazine Istoe Gente broke a report of a thirty-two-year-old illegitimate daughter in New York.
Unfortunately, he’d left a trail of malfeasance that led to a far more damaging story. Throughout the winter of 2001, the daily Folha de São Paulo alleged that Pelé had skimmed $700,000 from a charity match that his company Pelé Sports Marketing had organized for UNICEF, set to be played in Buenos Aires. It was a scheme that involved two shell companies. In
response, Pelé pleaded ignorance. He passed blame onto his business partner of twenty years, firing him, then suing him, and dissolving Pelé Sports Marketing.
His anger, however, didn’t lead him to return the $700,000.
When I asked Pelé’s friends about his ethical mis-steps, they o¤ered several excuses. Some say that Pelé’s impoverished upbringing has made him crazy for money. But they say it’s also something a bit more sweet than that, too. When people help him, even unctuous ones, he remains willfully oblivious to their shortcomings.
He forgives their mistakes until it’s no longer socially acceptable for him to forgive. It’s not far from the sociologist Edward Banfield’s famous 1958 study of corruption, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society. Banfield explained that it’s the most familial-based societies, where the sense of obligation is strongest, that breed the worst nepotism and cronyism. In other words, Pelé, and Brazil, weren’t just ill-suited for reform. They were ill-suited for capitalism. Pelé could rake in profits. But as much as he told himself that he’d learned to make the cold calculations of the market, he couldn’t.
VI.
A few critics ascribe dark motives to the foreign investors.
They accuse them of using the clubs to launder money and cover other shady dealings. And, in some cases, there may be truth to this allegation. But most of the foreign investors had arrived in Brazil with a utopian glint in their eyes. All it would take to transform soccer, they theorized, was a bit of transparency, the modern magic of marketing, and exploitation of synergies. They spoke of turning the game into a slick, profitable spectacle—complete with skyboxes and lucrative television contracts. Hicks, Muse of Dallas had even begun the Pan-American Sports Network to televise its teams’ games. It was an ambitious plan, and it might have worked had they torn the teams away from cartolas like Eurico Miranda. HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE SURVIVAL OF THE TOP HATS
Miranda invites me to São Januário on the morning after the club’s 104th birthday. The night before there had been a gala celebration on the Rio oceanfront. This morning, he’s holding a press conference to announce the signing of a highly regarded Serbian émigré named Dejan Petkovic. The celebration the night before, he says, has motivated him “to shake things up.” But there’s another reason he needs Petkovic. Vasco has had a less than stellar start to the season. By occupying a position near the bottom of the league table, Vasco has threatened Miranda’s reelection bid. In the parl-ance of American political science, the team’s poor performance threatens to depress the turnout of Eurico’s base. Petkovic is a piece of political pork, a last-minute move to reenergize the club’s supporters.
Miranda does little to conceal his ulterior motives.
At the press conference, his aides place three burly guys in back of the bank of microphones. Moments before Miranda appears with Petkovic, when the television cameras will turn on, an aide hands the burly men T-shirts with Eurico’s name and campaign logo. As journalists enter the press conference, held in the stadium’s “presidential conference room,” one of
Miranda’s lackeys o¤ers them a campaign bumper sticker. He screams at a cameraman, “It’s not right to wear Bermuda shorts
