It’s training time on a drizzly morning in the impoverished Brazilian suburb of Los Angeles and 18 footballers huddle in circles, exchanging passes, headers and a sporadic barrage of expletives.
For residents of this impoverished area near Campo Grande, where boggy tracks wind between wooden shacks and cows amble from street to street, it’s an ordinary morning. But this is no ordinary Brazilian football team. Nor is the team’s owner — the eccentric 86-year-old leader of the Unification Church, Reverend Sun Myung Moon — your run-of-the-mill chairperson.
Part of a miniature football empire commanded by evangelism’s answer to Roman Abramovich, the New Hope Sports Centre (Cene) represents, say its directors, an attempt to transform Brazil’s increasingly decadent national game as well as a step along the road to world peace. ”Our plans were always that, within 10 years, we’d be in the top flight,” says Jose Rodrigues, the club’s marketing director. ”That means 2009, so we have three years to really show what we can do.”
For Moon’s many critics, the team is nothing more than bait used to draw locals into his controversial sect, offering access to education and sports to convert people from vulnerable, deprived communities. Cene is one of two Moon-backed teams (the other is in São Paulo) that form the sports wing of a South American Moonie kingdom, now made up of around 200 000ha of farmland in Brazil, bought for an estimated $25-million, and at least 600 000ha in neighbouring Paraguay.
Followers say that, through this transnational corridor, Moon hopes to project his ideas across the continent. ”In truth, football has the power to do something nothing else can do: create one, single belief,” says Paulo Telles, the club’s executive president and a member of Moon’s Family Association in Brazil.
Moon’s Brazilian odyssey is said to have begun in 1994 during a fishing trip to the Pantanal, one of the world’s largest wetlands. Astonished by the area’s wildlife, he returned to begin constructing the estate that now straddles Brazil’s border with Paraguay.
The centrepiece of this ever-growing empire is the New Hope ranch, near the small town of Jardim. Here the Moonies receive followers from around the world, for visits of up to 40 days. Twelve neatly organised brick bungalows sit next to the Moonie church, a huge terracotta mansion with the group’s logo sprouting from its roof. Foreign visitors cruise around the community in white VW vans and, during the week, the area’s state school fills with children from nearby towns.
At first, Moon’s arrival in Brazil sparked a mixture of curiosity and outrage among politicians and business people and, at the very mention of ”reverendo Moon”, eyes still roll across the agricultural frontier in Brazil’s centre west.
Rumours about cross-border drug trafficking and brainwashing rattled round its capital, Campo Grande, and a parliamentary inquiry was set up to investigate. ”We’re going to start putting people in jail,” said state deputy Nelito Camara after the inquiry, claiming that the authorities had proof of money laundering between Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay, but that followers had been coerced into silence. ”I believe these people are being brainwashed and will only talk if we play hardball.”
The Moonies were accused of evading $31,5-million tax a year. Federal police carried out raids on Moon’s property — including the headquarters of Cene — in 2002, seizing laptops, a satellite phone, a pistol and traveller’s cheques.
Such controversy is lost on the team’s players, who praise their boss’s punctuality with their wages and the exposure their links to the Moonies have given them. ”It’s all him,” says Jorge Henrique, the team’s trendy 23-year-old striker, sporting a designer denim cap and immaculate Nike trainers. ”You go to Rio de Janeiro or São Paulo and the guys there already know who you are because of Reverend Moon.”
In the battle to win Brazilian hearts and minds, Moon seems to have struck gold. When he took over, in 1999, Cene was an amateur team of farm workers at his New Hope ranch — a university campus-like settlement known to followers as his Garden of Eden. Since then the ”yellow hurricanes” have become the dominant force in the state championship as well as one of the rising stars in the national game. Last month they narrowly missed out on a spot in the quarterfinals of the Copa do Brasil, losing 5-3 to the Rio team Fluminense.
”He always says sport is a way of promoting peace,” says Rodrigues, toe-punting a stray ball back towards the training session. ”But I think it’s also strategic. If you have a good appearance in a country which is known as one of football’s most important places, this ends up aggregating certain types of values.”
In the Cene changing rooms, Moon remains a relatively unknown entity who few of the players have met. ”Our business is football,” says Jorge Henrique, whose greatest memory of a Moon-sponsored tour of Korea was the food. ”[Moon] never obliged anyone to do anything. Those who want to go, do.”
Yet the players have felt the force of his money. Telles says Moon, a multi-millionaire whose business interests include universities, newspapers and cattle ranching, pumps around $60 000 into the club each month. The players earn more than double the amount their regional counterparts receive.
Despite the recent cup defeat, employees believe Moon’s Brazilian juggernaut is unstoppable, with an increasing number of followers and supporters flocking to the team and the evangelical and anti-communist sect.
Crucial to the group’s success is youth work, explains Telles, pointing to the group’s community projects, which offer football training to impoverished youngsters. ”This is how you form somebody,” he says over lunch in the canteen where Cene’s professional team mixes with youth players.
”Around one child you have at least 20 people. So, look, from [working with] 1 000 people that gives you 20 000. This multiplies each year. It’s a grand project.” — Â