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FOOTBALL AND POLITICS

A change to stay the same at the head of the CBF

On May 12, Carlo Ancelotti, one of the most successful football managers in the sport’s history, was announced as the new head coach of the Brazilian men’s national team. He will announce his first squad selection on Monday, to play Brazil’s two World Cup qualifiers against Ecuador and Paraguay at the beginning of June.

Despite the will-he-won’t-he soap opera running for the last two years, Ancelotti’s OK still came as somewhat of a surprise. The timing was off, as “Carletto” still had two league games left in charge at Real Madrid, with his send-off at the Santiago Bernabéu only taking place this morning with a match against Real Sociedad.

As it turned out, the stilted timing of the announcement was intentional, as then-president of the Brazilian Football Confederation (CBF), Ednaldo Rodrigues, knew his days in charge were numbered.

Since the beginning of April, when Brazilian monthly magazine Piauí published a sprawling exposé on a litany of scandals within the CBF under Rodrigues’s stewardship, the 71-year-old’s name has been trash throughout the world of Brazilian football.

On May 15, a Rio de Janeiro court issued a ruling suspending Rodrigues from office under allegations of fraud, appointing Vice President Fernando Sarney to stand in and call new elections, scheduled for tomorrow.

The court had ruled that an agreement between the CBF and the governing body’s former directors — which was ratified by the Supreme Court in February and acknowledged the legality of Rodrigues’s presidency — contained a fraudulent signature.

For that agreement to be binding, it required the signature of now 86-year-old former CBF head Coronel Nunes, the confederation’s eldest vice president at the time. Diagnosed with brain cancer in 2018, Nunes would not have had the cognitive capacity, the court argued, to sign off on such a document. Third-party forensic analysis hired by the plaintiffs concluded that Nunes’s signature on the agreement had been forged.

With Rodrigues’s suspension, ironically enough, Coronel Nunes is now the only former CBF president since 1989 not to have been removed from office on accusations of corruption, fraud or sexual harassment.

Rodrigues appealed the court’s decision but ended up withdrawing his protests on Monday and accepting his fate. However, he denies wrongdoing and affirms that all signatures on the document in question are genuine.

Rodrigues could see the writing on the wall. In the aftermath of the Piaui article, Rodrigues became radioactive, and the political support he enjoyed eroded fast. Supreme Court Justice Gilmar Mendes, whose injunction had kept Rodrigues in his post as CBF president for more than a year, went from faithful ally to requesting that the Rio de Janeiro courts investigate “serious reports of fraud.”

Sources within the CBF affirmed that Rodrigues’s relationship with Justice Mendes was the main thing keeping him in power for so long.

Justice Mendes is the founder of the IDP higher education facility in Brasília, which also oversees the CBF’s training courses for coaches and sporting directors. Despite the potential conflict of interest, Mendes has never recused himself from ruling over matters concerning Rodrigues’s election.

Just hours after the Rio de Janeiro court decision ousted Ednaldo Rodrigues, 19 Brazilian state federations issued a manifesto calling for a “renewal of ideas, of practices and of leaders.”

The next day, these same federation heads announced 41-year-old Samir Xaud, of the state football federation of tiny northern state Roraima, as their candidate for CBF president.

A qualified doctor and jiu-jitsu black belt, Xaud is second in command at the Roraima state football federation, an organization his father Zeca has presided over since 1986. Brazil’s least populous state, Roraima’s football federation has just 10 member clubs, of which only eight compete in the state championship. Only one team from Roraima, São Raimundo, competes in the fourth division of the Brazilian league.

Some behind-the-scenes politicking later, it was revealed that Xaud will stand unopposed in tomorrow’s election and will be the CBF’s new president. By last Sunday, he had sewn up the binding support of 25 state federations and 10 clubs, including first-division sides Botafogo, Palmeiras, Grêmio and Vasco.

Any competing slate would require the backing of eight federations and five clubs just to pass the first hurdle of registration — and there are only two states left up for grabs.

In case it is not already abundantly clear, Xaud is not the face of renewal at the CBF. Instead, he is the compromise candidate between warring factions that dominate the politics of Brazil’s national sport, namely the Mendes and Zveiter judicial dynasties — a feud we explained in the May 16 issue of our Brazil Daily newsletter.

The consensus around Zaud allows football’s narrow and entrenched elites to remain in power, despite their internal differences, and wards off any threat of a club-led revolution. And, as is plain to see, the sport of football was nowhere near the conversation.

A group of 20 first- and second-division clubs announced that they will symbolically abstain from Sunday’s vote, but also expressed their willingness to establish dialogue with the soon-to-be-elected Xaud administration.

And so, where does this imbroglio leave Carlo Ancelotti and the national side? The Italian coach was reportedly made aware of Ednaldo Rodrigues’s suspension and showed little concern, affirming that his contract is with the CBF, and not with Rodrigues.

Fernando Sarney, the CBF’s caretaker head until Xaud takes charge in tomorrow’s election, indicated that he sees no reason to interfere with the hiring of Ancelotti. “We’ll leave things as they are,” he said. “The people liked [Ancelotti’s appointment], public opinion approved, there’s no reason for us to interfere.”

Carletto is scheduled to meet with Xaud on Monday morning at the CBF’s headquarters in Rio de Janeiro, before his official unveiling at the Grand Hyatt Hotel, in Barra da Tijuca. The political elite of Brazilian football will be hoping to see the spotlight taken off them for the time being, and on to the 23-man squad Ancelotti will announce for the upcoming World Cup qualifiers.

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