SPORT-BRAZIL: A Champion in Exporting Footballers

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Jan 9 2002 (IPS) - Brazilian football, known as “the beautiful game”, lost a good part of its power and prestige this year due to previously unimaginable defeats and to the difficulties the national team had in winning a berth for the 2002 World Cup, but the country continues to be the world’s leading exporter of football players.

From January to November 2001, 733 players emigrated, 32 more than the prior year, according to the Brazilian Confederation of Football (CBF), an institution that has seen its credibility eroded in the world of sports.

The export of footballers has risen constantly since the early 1990s, and has increased five-fold in the last decade. But most of these athletes are traded for very low sums compared to the money changing hands in deals involving international football stars, who may be promising young players or veterans nearing the end of their professional careers.

In 1990, a relatively low number of players were transferred abroad – 136 -, but the number of contracts being signed began to skyrocket after 1994, when Brazil won its fourth World Cup, played that year in the United States.

Portugal is still the number-one destination of Brazilian players, receiving nearly 30 percent of those leaving their home country. The European nation takes in nearly three times the number of trades to Japan. This second-most popular country among Brazilian footballers compensates their efforts to adapt to the Asian culture and language with high salaries.

The emigration of these athletes continues to see a rise in the number and diversity of countries to which they are willing to move to practise their sport.

China, which for the first time has qualified to compete for the World Cup, to be played this June in South Korea and Japan, attracted two former members of the Brazilian national team: Marcio Santos and Junior Bahiano, both over 30 years old.

The transfer of players’ contract represents an important source of cash for this South American country, totalling 114.9 million dollars from January to September 2001, 17 percent more than the same period in 2000, says the Central Bank of Brazil, which has begun to pay closer attention to this sort of transaction.

The money flowing through Brazil’s coffers is much less than the real sum involved in the sports transfers due to bookkeeping irregularities, to the exchange of one football player for another (in which money does not change hands), or to payments based on the revenues from matches organised between the entities involved in the transfer.

The standout “sale” of player last year was that of Giovanni, of the Cruzeiro club in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, to Spain’s Barcelona club, for 18 million dollars.

The Brazilian authorities have found that the clubs evaded taxes in declaring income from many of these transactions in the past, and were depositing the money in Caribbean tax havens. Such irregularities have become a major headache for many of the people heading the country’s football industry.

An investigative commission of the Brazilian Senate, which presented its report last Dec 6, recommended that the government prosecutors bring 17 people to trial.

The defendants include heads of football clubs and of the regional football federations, as well as the president of the CBF himself, Ricardo Teixeira, for financial and tax crimes, falsification of documents, and corruption.

Experts attribute the Brazilian football crisis to the chaos reigning at the administrative level, to the informal nature of the sports industry – in spite of its growing economic weight – and to the resistance of football executives to changing their management styles.

The heads of the football clubs and federations are opposed to the new Brazilian legislation that would turn the entities into businesses. The law would obligate them to open their financial accounting information to the scrutiny of the authorities and to their own business partners, Marcilio Krieger, an attorney specialising in sports law, told IPS.

The decadence of Brazilian football became clear last year in the national team’s mediocre performance in the qualifying matches for the 2002 World Cup. It ended up in fourth place among the 10 teams from South America that were in the running.

Furthermore, the once unbeatable Brazilian team was defeated for the first time ever by teams that lack a strong football history, as was the case in the match against Honduras at the Americas Cup played in Colombia, and in the match against Australia.

This record pushed Brazil from first to third place in the ranking of the Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), surpassed by France, the most recent World Cup champion, and by Argentina.

The deterioration of the Brazilian football industry’s structure, including its finances, is an additional factor prompting players to emigrate, because it has diminished the quality of the matches played here and discourages the participation of the sport’s fans – a vicious circle.

Nevertheless, the Brazilian players have maintained their image of quality, judging by the international demand for their playing abilities, which has generated a new type of business for this country.

The phenomenon swelled the ranks of entrepreneurs who negotiate the transfers of players’ contracts, of talent scouts and of teams specialising in training young footballers to “sell” them later on the international market for hefty profits.

Even the major clubs, like Sao Paulo – which has served as a “nursery” for numerous star players -, have balanced their finances by exporting their most promising young strikers.

Such was the case in 2001 of Juan, a 19-year-old left wing, and of midfielder Paulinho, 18, who the Sao Paulo club “sold” to Britain’s Arsenal club for a total of just 300,000 dollars for the two, but with a clause reserving a share of their future incomes.

Brazil is also a major importer of footballers, which underscores the growing international circulation of these professional athletes. Teams here brought on board 352 foreign players in 2000, and 344 from January to November 2001, compared to just 153 coming from other countries in 1995.

The “imported” players come mostly from other South American countries, though there are many from the former Yugoslavia, arriving after the war broke up that republic in the first half of the 1990s.

Petkovic, midfielder for the Flamengo club of Rio de Janeiro, is the most famous of these Yugoslavian immigrants.