Soccer in Sun and Shadow

A Sport of Evasion

When Spain was still suffering under the Franco dictatorship, Real Madrid president Santiago Bernabéu set out a definition of the club’s mission: “We are serving the nation. What we want is to make people happy.”

His colleague from Atlético de Madrid, Vicente Calderón, also praised the sport’s virtues as a collective Valium: “Soccer keeps people from thinking about more dangerous things.”

In 1993 and 1994 the directors of several soccer teams around the world were charged and prosecuted for swindles of various sorts. Evidently soccer is useful not only for hiding social tensions and evading social conflict, but also for hiding assets and evading taxes.

The days are long gone when the most important clubs in the world belonged to the fans and the players. In those remote times, the club president went around with a bucket of lime and a brush to paint the lines on the field, and as for directors, their most extravagant act was footing the bill for a celebratory feast in the neighborhood pub. Today clubs are corporations that move fortunes to hire players and sell spectacles, and they have grown accustomed to tricking the state, fooling the public and violating labor rights and every other right. They are also used to impunity. There is no multinational corporation that enjoys greater impunity than FIFA, the association of professional clubs. FIFA has its own justice system. Like the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland, FIFA’s unjust system sentences first and tries later, so there will be plenty of time to cover up.

Professional soccer operates at the margins of the law, in a sacred territory where it can dictate its own laws and ignore all others. But why should the law operate at the margins of soccer? Judges rarely dare to red-card the big clubs for cooking the books to score illegal goals on the public treasury and leave the rules of clean play sprawled on the ground. The fact is judges know they risk a sharp whistle if they use an iron hand. Professional soccer is untouchable because it is popular. “The directors steal for us,” say the fans, and they believe it.

Some judges are prepared to defy the tradition of impunity, and recent scandals have at least shone a little light on the financial acrobatics and shell games that some of the richest clubs in the world play as a matter of course.

When the president of the Italian club Perugia was accused of buying referees in 1993, he counterattacked by charging, “Eighty percent of soccer is corrupt.”

Experts agree he was being generous. Every important club in Italy, from north to south, from Milan and Torino to Napoli and Cagliari, is involved in fraud, some more, some less. Their falsified balance sheets hide debts several times the value of their capital; the directors maintain slush funds, phantom companies, and secret Swiss accounts; instead of taxes and social security they pay hefty bills for services not rendered; and the players tend to pocket a lot less money than the books say they receive, as it gets lost along the way.

The same tricks are common among the most well-known clubs of France. Several directors of Bordeaux were charged with embezzling funds for personal use, and the head honchos of Olympique de Marseille were taken to court for bribing their opponents. Olympique, the most powerful club in France, was knocked down to second division and lost the titles of champion of France and champion of Europe when its directors were caught bribing several players from Valenciennes just before a match in 1993. That episode put an end to the sporting career and political ambitions of the businessman Bernard Tapie, who got a year in prison and ended up bankrupt.

At the same time, the Polish champion Club Legia lost its title for having “arranged” two matches, and Tottenham Hotspur in England revealed that it had been asked to make payments under the table to obtain a player from Nottingham Forest. The English club Luton, meanwhile, was being investigated for tax evasion.

Several soccer scandals erupted simultaneously in Brazil. The president of Botafogo charged that the directors of Brazil’s professional league had manipulated seven matches in 1993, winning a small fortune in bets. In São Paulo other lawsuits revealed that a local soccer federation boss had grown rich overnight, and when certain phantom accounts were examined it became clear that his sudden fortune did not result from a life devoted to the noble calling of sport. As if that were not enough, the president of the Brazilian Soccer Confederation, Ricardo Teixeira, was sued by Pelé for taking bribes in the sale of television broadcast rights. In response to Pelé’s suit, Havelange named Teixeira, who is his son-in-law, to the FIFA board.

Nearly two thousand years before all this, the biblical patriarch who wrote the book of Acts told the story of two early Christians, Ananias and his wife Sapphira, who sold a piece of land and lied about the price. When God found out, he killed them on the spot.

If God had time for soccer, how many directors would remain alive?