With foreign investors out of Brazil, the leading proponent of soccer capitalism became the sports minister, a lifelong technocrat and old friend of President Cardoso called José Luis Portella. He invited me to watch his weekly soccer game, played in a field in northern São Paulo. The players in his league are, by rule, all at least forty-five years old. Portella is a short man, without obvious soccer gifts. He couldn’t be further from Pelé, whose old ministry he now occupies. But he’s not nearly as physically challenged as some of his teammates. A few are so rotund—diet and fitness have no place in Brazilian masculinity—that they don’t ever run for longer than five seconds at a stretch. Several of Portella’s teammates are in their mid-sixties. These limitations, however, do little to deter Portella and his teammates from treating the game with the utmost seriousness.
The teams have coaches who pace the sidelines cursing their lack of e¤ort and stray passes. They’ve hired a referee who just retired from administering games in the top Brazilian league. Despite the referee’s experience, the players argue with him as much as any group of professionals, if not more. By the end of the first half, the sports minister himself has received a yellow card for screaming in the referee’s face.
When Portella and I sit down, he doesn’t hide his pessimism about the future of the game. Not even the indictment of Eurico Miranda, he says, would alleviate soccer’s deep crisis. But watching Portella play, he undermines his own argument. Even this group of unfit men plays stylishly. They use spin to pass the ball in entirely unexpected directions, shoot with the back of their heals, and showboat their dribbling skills.
Despite the persistence of corruption, Brazil’s mania for soccer has hardly abated; its natural soccer resources don’t seem close to exhausted. It’s too essential a part of the national character. As Portella’s team scores, the middle-aged men kiss the club’s insignia on their jerseys and kiss one another; they tumble into a heap on the field. Even among Brazil’s accountants, taxi drivers, and government technocrats, there are moments that make you want to get down on your knees and give thanks to Our Lady of Victories. o
H o w S o c c e r E x p l a i n s
t h e B l a c k C a r p a t h i a n s
I.
Edward Anyamkyegh disembarked at Lviv Interna-
tional Airport in the Ukraine precisely ten years into postcommunism. Hints of the old regime could still be detected in the small building. A fading frieze paid tribute to heroic workers carrying their metal tools like swords. Police in brown military hats with large swooping crowns, the kind that used to populate Kremlin Square parades, stared self-importantly at arrivals.
Because they were trained to be suspicious of visitors, and because Edward looked so di¤erent, the police pulled him aside. Why have you come to the Ukraine?
The sight of Edward Anyamkyegh in 2001 may have shocked the police. But in those days, the exhausted end of an era of rapid globalization, his arrival shouldn’t have been so disconcerting. It could even be described as one sign of the fading times. In that epoch, strange cultural alchemies had proliferated: Eastern Europeans harvesting Tuscan olive groves; Bengalis answering customer service calls for Delaware credit card companies; and, as in the case of Edward Anyamkyegh, Nigerians playing professional soccer in the Ukraine.
Around the time of Edward’s arrival, Nigerians had become a Ukrainian fad. Within a few months, nine Nigerians were signed to play in Ukraine’s premier league. They were the most prestigious purchases a club could make. A roster devoid of Nigerians wasn’t considered a serious roster; an owner who didn’t buy Nigerians wasn’t an ambitious owner.
Like all boom markets, the Nigerian fixation betrayed an irrational exuberance. But there was logic behind it, too. During communism, Ukrainian soccer clubs had been state-run enterprises. When the regime ended, however, nobody bothered to privatize them. In many cases, nobody even paid their bills. The situation grew so dire that the Ukrainian game might have disappeared altogether. But the game found its saviors in the country’s richest men, the oligarchs. The Ukrainian oligarchs were men who had transitioned seamlessly to capitalism from their slots in the Communist Party bureaucracy, turning insider ties to the old state into new wealth. By covering the expenses, the oligarchs became de facto owners.
The oligarchs announced great ambitions for their new possessions. They told fans that they wanted their teams to take places alongside the greatest clubs of Italy, Spain, and England. To accomplish such a gargan-tuan task, they would have to imitate the approach of these clubs. One thing in particular caught their attention: the prevalence of black faces. You could see why HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE BLACK CARPATHIANS
the Western Europeans had so many of them. Africans had the skills and speed that Ukrainians lacked. They had ingenuity that could make a bland Eastern Bloc team look downright continental.
Lviv had its own oligarch, Petro Dyminskyy. In communism, he’d managed the region’s coal mines. After communism, he amassed an incredible fortune—several hundred million dollars reportedly—buying and selling Western Ukraine’s bountiful gas, oil, and coal reserves.
In the spring of 2001, he added to his holdings the local soccer club, named Karpaty Lviv after the nearby Carpathian mountain range. By investing a small bit of his fortune, Dyminskyy hoped that he could create his own, massively successful team. And with the media glow from this success, he planned on launching a career as a politician, following the Silvio Berlusconi model.
Dyminskyy was no professional soccer man. But he could see the thinking behind the Nigerian purchases made by his fellow owners, and it appealed to him.
When an agent from the former Soviet republic
