The corrupt Brazilian who transformed world football
João Havelange 1916-2016
“I have come to change entirely the way Fifa works,” João Havelange declared on being elected Fifa president in 1974. “I have come to sell a product called football.” The tall, charismatic Brazilian – a former Olympic athlete and the head of Brazil’s Sports Confederation – was given to audacious claims. Yet he was as good as his word, said The Guardian. During his 24 years at the helm of football’s global governing body, he transformed the “beautiful game” into a multibillion-dollar industry. But to his critics it was a triumph achieved at the cost of football’s soul: he seemed to care less about the sport than its commercialisation and expansion. And as his career came to an end, his legacy was irreparably damaged by a welter of revelations exposing corruption on a massive scale.
As a youngster growing up in Rio de Janeiro, Jean-marie Faustin Godefroid de Havelange, who has died aged 100, excelled at both football and swimming, said The Daily Telegraph, and his father, a Belgian arms dealer, extracted a deathbed promise that he would one day compete in the Olympics. In 1936, young João, as he was known, fulfilled his pledge by competing as a middle-distance swimmer at the Berlin Olympics, although he didn’t win a medal – a failure he attributed to the length of the sea voyage from Brazil, which, he maintained, had made it difficult to train. He went on to earn a fortune building up Brazil’s largest bus company, but returned to the world of sport in 1958, when he became head of the Brazilian Sports Confederation. That was the year in which Brazil won the first of three World Cups, an achievement due at least in part to the extraordinary skills of Pelé. And it was Pelé who proved a great asset to Havelange as he launched his bid to become head of Fifa: he toured the world, schmoozing delegates, with Pelé always at his side. The dynamic Havelange also stood out by being such a contrast to the “out-of-touch” and unshowy incumbent Fifa boss, Sir Stanley Rous. Rous ran the organisation from a ramshackle office in Zurich, with just a dozen full-time employees. By the time Havelange stepped down from the post, however, the staff numbered hundreds; he had secured huge sponsorship deals from the likes of Coca-cola and Adidas; and he’d doubled the number of countries participating in the World Cup – from 16 to 32. “I found an old house and $20 in the kitty,” he boasted. “I left property and contracts worth over $4bn. Not too bad, I’d say.”
That process of enrichment had its “upsides”, said Tom Peck in The Independent, not least in securing vastly greater resources for training young talent. Yet it came at the cost of Fifa becoming Havelange’s personal fiefdom, said The Guardian. Eventually even the most loyal of executives grew tired of his “Napoleonic” behaviour. He had a habit, for example, of concluding meetings by simply standing up and quitting the room. On one occasion, rather than discussing possible executive appointments with the board, he just handed members a list of his choices and declared that this settled the matter.
But Havelange overreached himself in 1994, when he had the ever popular Pelé ejected from a promotional event in Las Vegas. It was to punish Pelé for having accused Havelange’s son-in-law, Fifa executive Ricardo Teixeira, of corruption. Yet Pelé had the last word: by the end of the decade both Havelange and Teixeira were shown to have been involved in graft amounting to millions. Both avoided prosecution: corporate bribery isn’t a crime in Switzerland. Even so, Havelange felt it prudent to step down in 1998, though not before ensuring that his successor would be his protégé, Sepp Blatter. It wasn’t enough to save his reputation, however. In his old age, Havelange was compelled to surrender his position as honorary president of Fifa and membership of the International Olympic Committee after investigations by the FBI and Fifa’s own ethics committee uncovered yet more instances of malfeasance. Nonetheless, the old man went to his grave unbowed, said The Times. When asked recently what needed to change about Fifa, he replied defiantly: “Nothing. It is perfect.”