World Cup bosses kicked me in the teeth
Heine Allemagne invented the disappearing spray referees use to mark out free kicks but now says he has been left destitute as a farm hand after FIFA reneged on a £30m deal
FOUR years ago he had the world at his feet. As 3.2 billion football fans across the planet watched World Cup referees use a revolutionary new vanishing spray to ensure players were the correct distance away at free kicks, the inventor of that foam was being feted as a rags-toriches millionaire in the making.
One World Cup later Heine Allemagne, 44, who has registered the patent for his 9.15 Fair Play foam in no fewer than 44 countries, is destitute, forced to scratch out a living on a coffee farm in rural Brazil.
“FIFA robbed my idea,” he claims. “This is anti-fair play.” Allemagne says that after years of perfecting his spray, football’s governing body initially offered him $500,000 (£380,000) for the patent. He held out for more money and says: “The finance director of FIFA [Julio Grondona] told me to be smart, after the World Cup it was going to be worth more. He asked to use the spray in the World Cup because FIFA would pay no less than $40 million [£30.4million] after.”
FIFA never honoured that deal – and according to Allemagne has since encouraged other companies to manufacture the spray. In December a court in Rio de Janeiro acknowledged Allemagne’s patent and ordered FIFA to stop using the spray in any of its competitions or risk a fine of £10,000 per game.
FIFA has appealed that decision three times, claiming that there was no proof of any patents. The Brazilian judge, Ricardo Lafayette Campos, wrote that the existence of patents was beyond doubt.
Each of those appeals has been unsuccessful – meaning that for every game in this World Cup in which the spray is used, FIFA is technically in danger of committing a criminal offence under international law.
For its part, the organisation’s lawyers argue that FIFA doesn’t fall under the jurisdiction of Brazilian courts.
Allemagne first came up with the idea for his spray in 2000 while watching a football match at home in Ituiutaba, Brazil. “The commentator said something during the broadcast [about keeping the wall back],” he remembered. “I thought at that moment that I will resolve this.”
USING shaving foam to draw a line on the pitch came to him immediately – but the problem was how to ensure the spray would vanish again after a minute. Working with a local cosmetics company he developed a vegetable oilbased formula and in 2002 patented the concept.
There followed a decade of relentless promotion as Allemagne invested everything he had in his invention. He teamed up with Argentine business partner Pablo Silva, named the product 9.15 Fair Play – after the correct metric distance players must retreat from the ball at a free kick – and slowly it began to become a standard part of a referee’s kit.
In 2012, by now heavily in debt, he finally got the breakthrough he had been working for. FIFA invited him to discuss its use at its Switzerland headquarters in a meeting that included Julio Grondona and Angel Villar, president of the Referees’ Committee. The following year it was announced it would be used in the 2014 World Cup.
This was to be the moment Allemagne, who had grown up in poverty selling lollipops on the streets of Ituiutaba, would complete his extraordinary rags-toriches fairytale. When FIFA made its $500,000 offer just months before the competition kicked off he rejected it, saying now: “It was an offensive and indecent offer, it did not even pay for patent costs.”
He was also confident that after his invention was given its moment on the global stage he could name a price in the tens of millions.
As a mark of good faith he even offered FIFA 300 complimentary cans for the competition. “The sprays for the World Cup were given for free,” he says. “FIFA only gave me two tickets for the final of the World Cup…”
The spray was every bit as successful as he hoped, prompting FIFA former secretary general Jerome Valcke to write to Allemagne to say its use was a “great success for all the stakeholders involved and has certainly added to the fair play aspect of our game.”
That appears to have been the last civil words between them. “A month after the World Cup, Julio Grondona died,” says Allemagne. “FIFA began to behave in a hostile manner, ignoring me, pretending I did not exist and claiming that I had no patents. “Worse, FIFA invited companies to make pirate copies of the spray that I had spent 15 years developing and for which I held the patent.”
AS versions of Allemagne’s spray – now manufactured by several other companies – have become standard in matches across the world, the fortunes of its inventor have fallen.
After racking up huge debts getting 9.15 Fair Play off the ground, Allemagne has been left destitute, forced to take a job on a coffee farm 150 miles away from the family home in the hills of Brazil’s Minas Gerais state just to make ends meet.
But even as the rich and powerful FIFA executives toast the climax of another successful and lucrative World Cup, for Heine Allemagne the battle is not over.
“The judge banned the use of spray in football,” he says. “The spray in the World Cup is breaking the law. FIFA is committing a crime. What the world is seeing is a television theft worldwide.”