An article in one of Brazil's leading newspapers Estadão yesterday uncovers leaked contracts showing how the Brazilian soccer federation auctioned off the national team to a multinational marketing firm. The main points are as follow: * The list of players called must match criteria established by commercial partners. Any change on the squad must have the consent of the companies involved. * When a player is replaced, the one to get in his place must have the same marketing value. * The contract is held between CBF (the Brazilian national football federation) and a private company called Internacional Sports Events, a company with zero employees and no headquarters, located in the Cayman Islands. * The ten years contract gives ISE exclusive rights to manage the team's games and ownership of all transmission rights. * The contract states that the top players, considered part of the main team, must start every single match, with no space for newcomers whatsoever, until they have a proper "marketing value". * The responsible for this contract is Ricardo Teixeira, former president of CBF and son-in-law of former FIFA president Joao Havelange. Teixeira and Havelange received more than 40 million dollars worth of bribes from marketing agency ISL, which collapsed into bankruptcy in 2001. (summary from this reddit post) Such contracts may well exist for other FAs around the world, and these deals are compromising the integrity of the international game. Please discuss.
I am more interested in knowing what other countries have a 3rd party with the rights to organize and promote their friendly games. And also what do those contracts look like. Brazil can't be the only one. As I've mentioned elsewhere, Brazil have been doing this since at least the mid 90s. It's a known fact that became public around 2001 (maybe earlier). I also remember FIFA was investigating the legality of Nike's sponsorship deals with NTs back in the 90s. There was suspicion back then that Nike was forcing Brazil for example to call up certain Nike sponsored players to some friendlies that was promoted by them. They wanted to make sure for that Ronaldo would show up and play certain amount of minutes in their "Brazil Nike World Tour". One example was when Luxemburgo, the coach at the time, said that Nike told him to call Ronaldo up for 2 friendlies in Australia. Inter had requested to keep Ronaldo for extra time due to a game and he'd only be able to play 1 game for Brazil. So Luxemburgo decided against calling him up. Which pissed off Nike and the organizers because apparently they had to return ticket money as they had sold the games promoting Ronaldo as showing up.
Mid 90's huh? Well that explains everything about Brazilian football. I can't think that any other country would do this. It's madness.