The Cultural Ignorance of FIFA

Castor de Andrade might just be the most powerful mobster you’ve never heard of. Born into a life of crime in Rio’s suburbs, he graduated from local lotteries to an empire encompassing Cali and Sicily—and he had his own soccer club.

Even Brazil’s military dictators were terrified of Castor. But that didn’t scare off Joao Havelange, son of a gun-runner and a successful businessman who, as chief of FIFA, took a parochial, Eurocentric sport and turned it into a global powerhouse. But as Castor, the country’s “Carnival King”, began eliminating his rivals, the relationship with soccer’s most powerful man turned it—and the game—into something very different. As journalist Conor Powell, host of the Lords of Soccer podcast, tells us, it was a trend that has only gotten bigger today

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