There is a liturgy repeated every week in almost every country in the world, with no distinction between capitalists and socialists, between dictatorships and democracies, between rich and poor. Millions of people suspend their lives and their political opinions to spend two hours watching twenty-two men run after a ball. It is not an accident. What the stadium produces is not entertainment, but obedience, collective catharsis without political consequences, and an opaque financial architecture that no tax haven has managed to match. Latin American football was not corrupted by dirty money. It was designed, from its very institutional foundations, as a machine in the service of power.
The Second Circus
The Romans understood it before anyone else. The panem et circenses, the bread and the circus games, was a formula of government, not of entertainment. The difference between the Colosseum in Rome and the Estadio El Campín in Bogotá is technological, not structural. In both cases, the state offers the working classes a space of collective fury that is consumed within the stadium without spilling into the streets. Antonio Gramsci, the Italian sociologist imprisoned by Mussolini, called cultural hegemony the way in which the dominant classes succeed in making the dominated reproduce the conditions of their own domination. Football is the most effective mechanism of that hegemony because it does not present itself as control. It presents itself as passion.
The best-documented Latin American case of sport as a political tool is Argentina in 1978. General Videla’s military junta organised the FIFA World Cup whilst disappearing its opponents, torturing them in clandestine detention centres located a few kilometres from the stadiums and executing an extermination project that would cost thirty thousand people their lives. The ball rolled, Argentina won, and the world applauded. Ricardo Villa, a midfielder from that squad, summarised it decades later. They had been used to cover up thirty thousand disappearances. He felt betrayed. The World Cup was conceived and managed as a public relations operation by a regime that knew exactly what it was buying.
That logic did not disappear with the dictatorships. It grew more sophisticated. Modern mass sport produces a social disciplinary effect that no military junta could have guaranteed without repression. It requires no censorship, generates no martyrs, needs no decrees of martial law. It simply occupies the free time, the emotional space and the public conversation of tens of millions of people with content that threatens no existing power structure. That the match is on Saturday, that the team lost, that the referee was corrupt, that the manager must go. The stadium produces tribal identity and a perfectly administered calendar of emotions. What it never produces, under any circumstances, is political consciousness.
The World’s Biggest Laundry
The mechanism is simple, as are all well-designed extraction mechanisms. A football club receives money from multiple sources that are barely auditable by external bodies, including cash at the turnstile, sponsorship contracts, player transfers and official merchandise. The valuation of a player is, in essence, subjective. How much is a twenty-two-year-old striker with potential worth? The answer can be one million dollars or ten million dollars depending on who provides it, and no international body exists with any real capacity to verify the difference. That valuation differential is the space through which dirty money circulates.
The operation is an accounting one and relatively straightforward. A transfer contract is signed for twice the real value, the difference is paid off the books through an intermediary company registered in a low-tax territory such as the Cayman Islands or Panama. The player arrives, the money is laundered. Transactions with foreign clubs are carried out in one currency and recorded in another, contracts are signed for amounts lower than what the footballer actually receives, and the gap between the two figures disappears within the institutional opacity that football has cultivated for decades with the complicity of its own regulatory authorities.
Colombia was, throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the most advanced laboratory for this mechanism. Not because Colombian drug traffickers were especially creative, but because the regulatory environment was optimal for their purposes. An Exchange Statute from 1968 allowed foreign currency to be sold without justifying its provenance. The Dimayor, the División Mayor del Fútbol Colombiano, the governing body of professional football in the country, lacked both the capacity and the will to supervise. And the sports press lived off advertising revenue from the very clubs it should have been investigating. The first Colombian to be extradited to the United States was not a cocaine trafficker. It was the president of a football club.
Hernán Botero Moreno, owner of 76 per cent of Atlético Nacional and proprietor of Medellín’s Nutibara hotel, was extradited to the United States in January 1985. The American justice system accused him of laundering approximately 55 million dollars in drug proceeds. He spent seventeen years in American prisons. The club had won three national titles under his leadership. The Dimayor suspended a round of the professional championship in protest against the extradition, a gesture that captures with precision the place that drug trafficking occupied within Colombian football’s institutional structure at the time.
América de Cali, one of the country’s most popular clubs, was run by the Cali Cartel for over a decade. Miguel Rodríguez Orejuela, one of the cartel’s leaders, was a direct shareholder in the club. The purchase of players, the payment of bonuses and the club’s financial operations were conducted through Rodríguez’s family members or through frontmen, that is, persons who lend their name to conceal the identity of the true owner. In 1995, the United States government placed América de Cali on the Clinton List, a sanctions register for links to drug trafficking. The club remained on that list for seventeen years.
It was not an exception. In October 1983, Colombian Justice Minister Rodrigo Lara Bonilla declared that six of the main professional football clubs were in the hands of individuals linked to drug trafficking. Envigado FC, a minor club from the Medellín metropolitan area, was used by Juan Pablo Upegui as a financial vehicle for La Oficina de Envigado, a narco-criminal organisation that was the heir to Pablo Escobar’s empire. According to the United States Department of the Treasury, which placed the club and its directors on its list of sanctioned entities in 2014, the mechanism operated through the fictitious buying and selling of players and cash ticket sales.
Between 1983 and 2015, at least eight Colombian professional football clubs were subject to judicial investigations for links to drug trafficking. Hernán Botero Moreno, president of Atlético Nacional, was convicted in the United States for laundering approximately 55 million dollars and became the first Colombian to be extradited to that country. América de Cali spent seventeen years on the US Treasury Department’s Clinton List. Independiente Medellín allegedly served, according to the club’s auditor, as a vehicle for laundering more than 150 billion Colombian pesos on behalf of six distinct criminal groups between 1978 and 2008.
CONMEBOL as a System
Luis Bedoya was president of the Colombian Football Federation between 2006 and 2015. He was a respected figure in international football circles, with strong ties within CONMEBOL, the South American Football Confederation. In May 2015, the United States Department of Justice revealed that he held a Swiss bank account in which he kept money received as bribes. He resigned from the Federation that same day and began cooperating with American prosecutors to avoid imprisonment. What his testimony revealed was not the story of a corrupt man within a clean system, but that of an institution in which corruption was the ordinary mode of operation.
The scandal known as FIFAGate, exposed in 2015 by American prosecutors, uncovered a bribery network spanning at least two decades. The mechanism was precise. Sports marketing companies such as Torneos y Competencias from Argentina, known as TyC, paid systematic bribes to CONMEBOL officials in exchange for broadcasting rights to the Copa Libertadores and Copa América. It was not an irregular commercial negotiation. It was a fee schedule. Alejandro Burzaco, owner of TyC and key witness at the 2023 Brooklyn trial, stated that he had paid more than 160 million dollars in bribes to thirty different individuals over that period.
In Mexico, the infiltration required no scandal to be acknowledged. In 2020, the Secretariat of Security and Citizen Protection produced an internal report admitting, without euphemism, that every division of Mexican professional football had been involved in activities related to drug trafficking. The document identified that in Jalisco, the state where the Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación operates, a criminal organisation known by its acronym CJNG, there were 29 football franchises concentrated in areas of active territorial dispute. Rafael Márquez, the Mexican national team’s historic captain, was placed on the Clinton List in 2017 for documented links to the CJNG. The Mexican state did not discover a problem. It certified one it already knew about.
American prosecutors charged 45 individuals and several sports companies within the FIFAGate framework with more than 90 criminal counts and with paying or accepting more than 200 million dollars in bribes. Twenty-seven of the accused pleaded guilty. Former CONMEBOL president Juan Ángel Napout and former Brazilian football president José Marin were convicted at trial. Alejandro Burzaco, the principal witness and one of the scheme’s architects, admitted to having distributed tens of millions of dollars amongst thirty officials in exchange for broadcasting rights to the Copa Libertadores and Copa América.
Image Laundering
What Latin American drug trafficking did at the scale of a club, the petrostates of the Persian Gulf, meaning the countries whose economies depend on oil and gas, replicate at the scale of a nation. The mechanism is structurally identical. Money whose origins are politically inconvenient is introduced into a high-profile sporting institution, symbolic legitimacy is obtained in exchange that no conventional public relations campaign could generate, and the passion of millions of supporters is converted into a shield against political criticism. Academics call this sportswashing. Colombian drug traffickers simply called it business.
Qatar invested approximately 220 billion dollars in infrastructure for the 2022 World Cup, the largest outlay by a host country in the history of sport. Saudi Arabia had spent at least 1.5 billion dollars on sportswashing activities before securing the hosting rights to the 2034 World Cup, according to Grant Liberty. Gianni Infantino, FIFA’s president, was accused of having manipulated the voting procedures to facilitate that award. No accusation had any institutional consequences. FIFA, which was the central stage of the greatest corruption scandal in the history of sport, continues to be the body that decides which countries deserve to host its tournaments.
The connection between the petrostates’ sportswashing and the structural corruption of Latin American football is not metaphorical. It is institutional. FIFA and CONMEBOL are the bodies that make both phenomena possible, because they are the entities that grant the legitimacy that makes the investment worthwhile, that establish rules sufficiently opaque for money to circulate without excessive traceability, and that produce the spectacle that makes that stamp of validation desirable. A club in Medellín in the hands of the Cali Cartel and a club in Paris in the hands of Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund are the same operation viewed from two different hemispheres. In both cases, what is being purchased is not football. It is respectability.
What distinguishes football from other instruments of power is its capacity to produce genuine loyalty, not feigned loyalty. Nobody pretends to love their team. That emotional authenticity is precisely what makes it the most sophisticated mechanism of control available to any structure of domination, whether a drug cartel, a military junta or an authoritarian state funded by oil. The stadium is not where power goes to hide. It is where power goes to show itself wearing its most agreeable face, surrounded by ninety thousand people who chant its name without knowing it…
G.S.
Sources
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- Narcotráfico y fútbol en Colombia: pasado y presente
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- Los 25 casos de lavado de activos más famosos
- Cinco equipos en la mira por vínculos con narcotráfico
- Ocho clubes de fútbol de Colombia investigados por nexos con narcotráfico
- FIFAgate: juicio en Nueva York por megaescándalo de sobornos
- Revelan millonario soborno en la CONMEBOL durante FIFAGate
- The Latam Officials Implicated in FIFA’s Scandal
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