Today’s guest columnist is Ricardo Fort, founder of Sport by Fort Consulting.
Two years ago, a consortium of leading Brazilian soccer clubs convened in an upscale hotel in São Paulo for an event poised to redefine the trajectory of the nation’s pastime. That gathering wasn’t their first, as club presidents had been in discussions 1-on-1 and as a group for over a year, but was particularly meaningful. Similarly to what their English counterparts did some 30 years earlier in creating the English Premier League (EPL), the presidents of Brazilian top clubs were set to commit to building an independent, professionally managed, and substantially more lucrative national soccer league.
The plan was clear: They would cut the ties with the Brazilian Football Federation (CBF), who has overseen the national championship execution and all its commercial aspects for decades; take full control from sponsorships to broadcasting and from refereeing to ticketing; and bring an investor to fund its launch and global expansion.
Thanks to a set of unrelated events, the odds to succeed were higher than they had ever been. CBF’s administration was in turmoil and didn’t have the political power to block the movement, and many clubs had professional presidents that understood the need to compromise their individual gains for a bigger collective payout. As important, there was new legislation in place allowing international investments in clubs and on the league itself.
Building a new league wasn’t an easy task, but they had a proven road map in some of the best European leagues: They would create a better match calendar with friendlier time slots for European and Asian broadcasters, increasing the value of the international TV rights; invest more in salaries preventing teenage players from migrating to other wealthier leagues; sign more profitable sponsorship deals with global brands thanks to their new and reliable management team; and convince streaming companies to open their wallets and buy their new packages.
As a result, club revenues would soar, propelling the Campeonato Brasileiro to rank among the top three soccer leagues in the world by 2032, trailing only the EPL and LaLiga.
The project could have worked very well if the country wasn’t Brazil.
Fast forward 18 months, and the ambitious plan to create the new league has evaporated entirely. The reasons behind Brazilian soccer squandering a once-in-a-generation opportunity to revolutionize domestic soccer are complex, petty and myopic.
First, to no one’s surprise, there was a disagreement on the revenue distribution criteria. The proponents’ approach was to mimic the early EPL days, reducing the earnings gap between top- and bottom-of-the-table clubs from 9x to 3.5x. This massive income redistribution, a serious compromise for the biggest clubs in the country, was received by the smaller ones with disdain. Instead, they demanded benchmarking to today’s EPL allocation, where the gap was near 1.8x.
Then there was plenty of self-serving nonsense.
Fluminense, the third largest club in the state of Rio de Janeiro, opted out, claiming that if the league was good for Flamengo (their archrivals and the leaders of the movement to create the league), it couldn’t be good for them.
Athlético Paranaense, a well-managed regional club in the south of Brazil, boycotted the league because their president had a disagreement with the family of one of the league advisors decades ago. For over a year, he worked hard to successfully recruit other clubs away from the league.
A selfish owner of another traditional club, realizing he could get a bigger cut of the pie if he—and not the collective group of clubs—brough the investor to fund the creation of the league, branched out and convinced a few more clubs to follow his path.
An opposition group of mid-table and Second Division clubs was formed. Surrounded by investors and advisors with questionable motivations and plenty of conflicts of interest, the clubs were convinced they should rebel and demand from the league clubs a much bigger piece of the pie, despite having an incomparable smaller fan base. The gap was too broad to bridge, and each side decided to go its own way. It was an ugly battle with plenty of misinformation and promises of unachievable gains.
On the surface, the anti-league faction appears victorious, with the league yet to materialize (at the time of writing). However, outcomes vary among groups. Pro-league clubs brokered a groundbreaking deal, selling their collective media rights to Globo, Brazil’s largest broadcaster, ensuring a substantial increase in media revenues for the next four seasons.
Conversely, the “against” clubs now confront the harsh reality of meager offerings. Excluded from Globo’s patronage, they are left to lower-budget free-to-air networks, low-reaching streaming platforms, influencer collaborations, or launching their own over-the-top (OTT) service. None of these alternatives, even when combined, will deliver their current earnings. Thus, their battles and petty disputes yield nothing but diminished revenues.
Today, the dream of a league is highly unlikely but not impossible. This much is certain: The system has created an own goal that will slow down the growth of soccer in Brazil for years to come.
As the only executive to lead the Global Sponsorship Departments of two FIFA and IOC sponsors—Visa and Coca-Cola—Fort negotiated over a billion dollars in sponsorships with the IOC, FIFA, UEFA, the Special Olympics, athletes and McLaren F1 team, among others. In 2021, he launched Sport by Fort Consulting, which helps sponsors, leagues, investors and athletes invest in sports.
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