Football agents - 'godfathers'- use sharp tactics to sell would-be stars to a world hungry for their talent, writes Jonathan Franklin
I have flown to Rio de Janeiro with a small fortune to spend. At least that's what I am telling football club owners, local scouts and the Fifa-certified football agents I meet.
My story is simple: a Danish First Division Football Club has tasked me to sign superstars who can dribble like Kaka in 2010 but can be bought for the price of Kaka in 2000. Once I find the right guys, I will immediately send their details and DVDs to Copenhagen. The money will follow.
The email addresses of the agents I am dealing with are available online. A few days before my trip, I made up fake company stationery, then a gmail account and finally a cover letter saying how desperate I am to buy a Brazilian striker. Within hours of sending it, my email inbox was stuffed.
Rio's agents reassured me, with varying degrees of broken English: "Here in Brazil we have many players in this position with much quality." No one seemed interested in who I was, or even where the player was destined. All they wanted was to shift product as quickly as possible.
"Brazilian football is a vast, unregulated bazaar of bartering player for personal gain," writes Alex Bellos in Futebol - The Brazilian Way of Life, arguably the best English language analysis of the game in the South American country, "a modern-day slavery - a scramble to sign up the 'rights' to promising youngsters and then make money by selling them to the highest bidder."
Brazil's footballers - like its other homegrown products, sugar and coffee - are also an international, billion-dollar commodity.
Renowned for playing the most acrobatic, inspired football in the world, managers around the globe are constantly on the look-out for an injection of their fancy footwork and positive energy.
Last year alone, the country exported around 1000 hopefuls overseas, to countries as remote as Albania and Vietnam.
No continent is more desperate for Brazilian talent than Europe, where the players of the year often are boys from Brasilia: Kaka, Ronaldo, Ronaldinho.
According to Folha de Sao Paulo, one of the country's most popular newspapers, Brazil was the best-represented nation in the Champions League last season, with more than 100 players playing in the group stages, despite regulations imposed by Uefa restricting the number of continental imports each team can field.
The influx of South American players isn't restricted to the upper echelons of European football: in 2006, Polish 1st Division side Pogon took the world's obsession with Brazilian football to its logical conclusion, fielding a team with 10 Brazilians.
In Brazil, the average professional player makes less than €800 ($1560) a month, although it's common for footballers to go months without seeing a pay cheque (in one famous case, the international superstar Romario resorted to paying the salaries of his fellow teammates).
"That's why they all want to play in Europe," explains Antonio Galante, a registered Fifa agent based in Rio. "They know that the end of the month is payday."
The reality of working abroad, though, frequently doesn't live up to the fantasy of playing in La Liga or the English Premiership.
In his book, Bellos describes the life of a clutch of Brazilians plying their trade in the Faroe Islands, who have to contend with arctic weather and contracts requiring them to work at the fish processing plant.
During my week-long stay in Rio, agents repeatedly bring up corrupt football markets where players are promised one salary and then fly halfway around the world to find their salary has been sliced in half.
They tell me that Greece and Turkey are notorious for this, and that most Brazilians accept the abuse.
"No one talks about the corruption in football," one agent told me, "because it would mean no one would do business with you any more.
"Many agents offer paradise, that is not the way it is," says Roger Machado Marques who, after skimming the surface of international stardom (after his debut in the 2001 Copa America, a home defeat to Mexico, coach Luiz Felipe Scolari never selected him again), joined the Brazilian exodus to Japan, where he played for top-flight side Vissel Kobe.
Roger has since returned to Brazil's Serie A but he offers the following advice to those hoping to find fame and fortune abroad. "Inform yourself, find competent and honest people to handle the merchandise - and [remember] we are the merchandise."
Sitting in his bland office, Marcelo Almeida looks like an insurance salesman. But when the round-faced, Fifa agent flips on his computer screen, he is transformed into the one-man eBay of Brazilian football. Almeida sells Brazilian players to all corners of the world through his company 3RAM's online catalogue.
While he has worked with A-list talent - his clients have included Ronaldinho, who is Godfather to Marcelo's son - his main business is buying the rights to second and third division stars and catapulting them into the European market. His fee is 10 per cent - of everything.
"Today I received an email from Kazakhstan," he tells me, shoving aside a pile of cell phones on his desk. "They are looking to buy an offensive midfielder, and they are offering €5000 a month. I have dozens like that."
Almeida knows what the Kazaks want - like the Italian Chef and Colombian Gangster, the Brazilian Footballer is an archetype that doesn't need explaining - and he works at his computer highlighting the names of potential exports. As he does so, he explains his system for finding young Brazilian football talent. "I visit training centres all over Brazil. And I have informants - they call me when a good player is spotted."
Because of the extreme poverty, most families with prodigious youngsters rely on "Godfathers" to nurture their offspring, and as a result these children's rights are frequently signed away for a pittance.
In the past three years, 3RAM has sold 35 players abroad, to countries including Qatar and Norway. Almeida claims he could sell three times as many but he prefers to cultivate players slowly. "These players are long-term investments - you develop a dozen and maybe one really makes it. Since the contracts are only for two years, if he doesn't feel that you are investing in him? Goodbye."
Almeida says he doesn't sell players under the age of 18 overseas.
"First, it is illegal: the Fifa does not permit that. Secondly, it is too much work. They miss mum and dad, don't like the food ... so when I work with players who are under 18, I place them with Brazilian teams. Then when they turn 18, they have developed and are ready to go abroad."
Although he sells players all over the world, there is one country that Almeida says he will never deal with. "I sold six football players to Albania, and the team there was run by thieves. My players never got paid, had their passports confiscated, it was terrible."
Brazilians harbour mixed feelings about the diaspora. Alejandre Bittencourt, a spokesman for the Fluminense Football Club in Rio de Janeiro, describes them like a harvest of good wine or sweet apples.
"Every year you find and sell players to Europe, Asia, the whole world," he says. "And the next year there is a new crop ready to go. You pick off all the apples and the next year, they grow back."
Legislators are considering new laws to regulate the trafficking of their star football players. At the International Football Forum, held last month in Rio de Janeiro, former Brazilian national coach Vanderlei Luxemburgo warned of a striker shortage if all the up-and-coming talent continued to be exported to Europe.
Luxemburgo's recommendations? Change the law so that Brazilian football players can't be sold abroad so young. "Today the law states that a player can leave Brazil at 21. In my opinion, the Brazilian player should stay in the country until 23."
Predictably, that's the last thing the agents would want. "Brazil is the only country in the world that can change all the players on the national team, and the level barely changes," says agent Antonio Galante. "Even in our third division, there are incredible players. The guys from European clubs don't believe these guys can play that good! Sometimes they want to pay €3 million for a guy from first division and they could pay €500,000 for another (equally good) player. But they pay more - for the guy who is famous.
"You want to see the future of European football? Go to the favelas."
I drive to Nova Iguacu, far beyond the limits of Rio de Janeiro, where the average salary is €100 a month and violence stalks everyday life.
Arriving at the local pitch at 7.30am on a Sunday, I find dozens of players in the Daybreak League training on a reddish dirt pitch, surrounded by garbage, overgrown bushes and house lots for sale at €55 a month.
The match is fast, furious and noisy. Brazilian kids dive, fly through the air and dribble like they were dancing with the football. The players yell and argue over every missed goal as the games turn into a 5 to 1 rout for the team in blue. They are fanatical about being in communal groups and football seems to have found its natural home here, far from its English birthplace.
Gordo (literally The Fat Guy) is a local scout. "See that forward, number 10, he has scored 4 goals," he exclaims. "If he was 16 years old, or 26, I could sign him, but he's 36. It's too late."
Ironically, the player's name is Junior. "He has already scored 43 goals this season," Gordo says, impressed. "But he never had a Godfather!"
Fate has been kinder to Jean Felipe, who has been watching the game from a shaded bench. The 16-year-old wears Nike shoes, a silver chain and sports clean-shaven legs. A young phenomenon, he has already been scouted by European teams and heralded in the local press for "finalizando" (scoring). His Godfather is Marcelo Almeida.
"We are lucky," says his mother Catia. "We have money to pay bus tickets to practice, for his lunch and for his uniform. He gets up at 5:30, has breakfast, then we drive him to the end of the bus line. That way he doesn't have to stand. He can sit on the [two- hour] bus ride to Rio. Many kids don't have this opportunity, they are stars, but their parents don't have the money for the bus, for the shoes. It is a story I hear frequently."
I ask Catia what happens if her son doesn't make it to the pros. She looks at me with a serious stare. "There is no Plan B."
