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By Tariq Panja
CURITIBA, Brazil – In many ways, Renan Lodi is nothing out of the ordinary. A defender of Atletico Madrid, Lodi is one of many Brazilian players who have crossed the Atlantic to play for European clubs in elite competitions such as the Champions League.
More than 50 Brazilians, in fact, played in the final. Lodi, 22, hopes to sign for the organization later this month, when Atletico Madrid and seven other more sensible organizations gather in Portugal to give the final backing of this year’s tournament pandemic.
But while Lodi is still 3 wins away from winning the trophy, his European odyssey has already proved a success for the company that discovered him at a secluded football school at the age of 13. He also validated a curious task from a built-up company. about the first investments in a valuable and abundant Brazilian export: the talents of football.
Since the 1970s, the Stival Family Circle has effectively controlled a food distribution business, one of the largest of its kind in southern Brazil, in the southern city of Curitiba. About 15 years ago, the family circle turned to football. Like millions of Brazilian families, stivals are passionate gaming enthusiasts. But they still couldn’t help them realize how football players had more and more products, bought and sold for millions of dollars, as well as the tons of beans, rice and grains that Stivals exchanged each week.
If players had commodities, the Stivals thought, they could find a way to make money by swapping them as well.
“The concept was to invest in this company because Brazil makes money in this business,” Rafael Stival said in an interview last year, 4 months before Lodi joined the exodus of more than three hundred footballers who traded Brazil into foreign leagues in 2019.
Sitting at his place of work in Trieste Futebol Clube, Curitiba’s amateur team that serves as the basis for his football interests, Stival, a strong guy with black hair and a wealthy baritone voice, described how, after an early hiccup and countless mistakes, he had shaped a business for Brazil’s youngest talents, briefly feeding them in Trieste and getting them signed through the country’s elite professional clubs in the country’s first Opportunity.
For Stival, who runs the family’s football operation, investing in young players is a long-term bet, a procedure he compares to planting seeds that will one day come. And Lodi is his biggest success to date.
Lodi, then 13, was invited to move to Curitiba for further inspection when she saw him in 2012 through one of Stival’s scouts at a football school in the interior of the state of Sao Paulo (population 44 million). He performed well enough to enroll in Stival’s amateur program before living at Athletic Paranaense school shortly after his 14th birthday.
Last summer, at the age of 21, he moved to Europe, in a remarkable operation for his period (16 million euros, or just over $18.8 million) but also for his destination, Atletico Madrid, one of the clubs on the continent.
In an interview from Spain in August, Lodi said she remembered well the early days in Trieste: loneliness, fear, night visits with her father who begged to pass home.
But he also remembered how he ate more in Trieste and, later, in Paranaense than ever at home, and also how his football skills were more than a professional career. His feet would discover the long journey of a whole circle of relatives plunged into poverty, which even a 13-year-old can understand.
“I put that lens in my head, you know?” said after a recent school session. “I thought, “I’ll be the father of the family.” I will pursue my dreams and check to give them a better condition in the future. »”
Last year’s move fulfilled that dream, but it also produced a great salary for Stival, which received a 30% relief (about 4.8 million euros, or about $5.6 million) in moving fees.
Such bills are the key to Stival’s football ambitions, and the explanation of why he recruits dozens of young players and temporarily transfers them to one of the most important clubs with which he has progression agreements: the more seeds he plants, the greater his chances. to see one bear fruit.
Lodi’s move to Madrid only the moment of a player’s transaction through Operation Stival since its debut in 2005. But in this transaction, Rafael Stival said, the circle of relatives has recovered more than part of its total investment.
In an earlier interview this summer, Stival said he hoped the sales rate would rise now that dozens of his recruits had climbed through the ranks of the football food chain. More than a hundred players who once gave the impression in Trieste’s books are now registered in professional teams, most of them in Athletico Paranaense or Rio de Janeiro Flamengo. The two clubs entered into partnership agreements that gave them the first right of rejection of The Trieste players.
Stival has a separate agreement with Trieste, a successful amateur team created through Italian immigrants in 1937. In exchange for making an abundant investment in your facilities, your circle of family members has the right to use the club as the basis for your football business. 20 years, a contract that expires in 2025. This investment also allows Stival to offload relief on moving fees because, under foreign moving regulations, only groups can gain advantages from player sales.
However, there has been a learning curve. Stival’s initial business plan targeted older children, who needed a little extra attention to prepare for professional contracts. Stival soon realized the biggest flaw in the plan. “They disappeared at night, ” he said, letting out a deep sigh. “A general disaster. We had to learn.
His revised plan, changing their attention from 18- and 19-year-olds to children as young as 12, would require more patience.
“When we got here, we thought we’d make cash in two years,” Stival said. “It’s been 14 years and we haven’t recovered our expenses yet.”
Sitting on seven giant maps of Brazilian states, Stival explained how players are discovered. Half a dozen scouts, adding Stival, spend a month-of-the-month project inside Brazil and watch many players at once. Advice on local prodigies comes from a network of local coaches, teachers and others, a winery that has brought Stival to some of the country’s top remote spaces, adding, at least on one occasion, an Aboriginal reserve.
The most productive players are invited to Trieste for a test that can last up to two weeks. Local legislation and age restrictions designed to prevent child trafficking mean that most players cannot stay on the club campus, so families face difficult decisions without delay. Some charges or even thousands of miles to accompany a child, attracted by the hope of life-changing opportunities that could be maintained if the test were successful. But the plan, at least on Stival’s side, is still for a while.
“Our concept is to notice talent,” Stival said. “We don’t have to be a player from 10 to 20 an end. We need to get him into a club and move on. A child of 10,11, 12, 13 years old, who has situations to live nearby, we.” You’re going to take it.
“It’s very fast here: every single day that goes by with us costs us dearly.”
For five years, Trieste had an exclusive agreement with Athletico Paranaense, one of Curitiba’s two most sensitive professional groups, a city of 1.8 million inhabitants. More than 60 players, adding Lodi, had traveled via Trieste to The Facilities of Atletico, now among the most productive in Brazil, before the contract reached an abrupt end in 2018. Atlético Paranaense, its president said in a WhatsApp message, had just carried most of his exploration progress and young people internally.
Stival’s sadness was short-lived. Less than 24 hours later, he said, Flamenpass officials arrived at his workplace to discuss the terms. An agreement has been signed and the most productive customers of Trieste now move to Rio.
Last year, however, a crisis erupted. A fireplace devastated a transient bedroom at Flamengo’s educational centre, which housed a handful of aspiring young men, killing 10 and adding up 3 children who had passed through Trieste. The deaths have put a belated emphasis on how Brazil, the world’s largest exporter of football talent, is concerned about the thousands of children and young people entering the football industry in the hope of overcoming obstacles.
Disturbing examples arose temporarily in other clubs (overcrowded dormitories, damaging conditions, poor oversight) and the government shut down the worst offenders and promised more oversight.
In Trieste, however, anything happened. Hopeful parents, now aware of the link between the club and the Flamengo Youth Academy, have begun to get in touch. Could the club, they asked, direct the sovereign about their children as well?
Stival can only deny with his head at that time. A year later, with Lodi’s revenue stream accumulated, Trieste’s operations continued to grow. Flamengo has recruited more than 30 Stival players into their youth ranks in the past 18 months, and those who cannot locate a position there are sent elsewhere. He hopes his investments will continue to produce another big wage.
A recent afternoon, Stival turned on his TV and reached the screen of Atletico Madrid playing a Spanish league match. Working up and down on the left flank, Lodi, now an emerging star, lives the dream of countless Brazilian teenagers. For the Stival family, he represented anything else: evidence of concept, a successful business plan in the form of an unbridled left-back.
If Lodi and Atlético achieve a deep career in the Champions League this month, Stival can see their investment roll back. In connection with the sale of Lodi last year, Atlético Paranaense negotiated a bond of 3 million euros (about 3.5 million dollars) based on its functionality in Spain.
Manuela Andreoni contributed to the in Rio de Janeiro.
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