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Mafia deals & fake granny deaths: Conman's 13-year pro career

Mafia deals & fake granny deaths: Conman's 13-year pro career

Yahoo19-07-2025
Let's get this straight: He really did it. Carlos "Kaiser" Henrique Raposo bluffed his way through professional football for 13 years without playing a single game. He never had the desire to kick the ball, but he had an (almost) endless repertoire of lies and excuses.
Carlos Kaiser was forced into the world of football - or at least that's what he claims. True or false, the Brazilian doesn't let anyone see his cards. His version goes like this: At the age of ten, an official from Botafogo discovered him during a street kick. But from then on, the "jogo bonito", the beautiful game, was over. "There used to be a transfer law in Brazil. My mother sold the transfer to a businessman who demanded a very high transfer fee, and I was forced to move from club to club, even though I didn't want to," Raposo described his reluctant career start to 'SAPO Desporto'.
Because the deals brought in a lot of money, his mother forcibly made him continue playing. The little Carlos therefore had to bury his dream of studying to become a sports teacher and resigned himself to his fate.
True or not, it gives an idea of why he later became such an extraordinary impostor. The fact is: After a short interlude at Flamengo, the reluctant one moved to Puebla in Mexico in 1979.
There he was still considered a promising talent, got his nickname "Kaiser" because he played as gracefully as the German legend. Or at least that's one version. His friend Luiz Maerovitch later claimed that the nickname was due to the Brazilian beer brand "Kaiser". That would at least fit the lifestyle of the party animal. But more on that later.
The trained striker never played a game in two years far from home. But he did get his golden ticket. The professional license, with which he returned to Brazil in 1981. It is also the starting signal for his incredible intrigues to never stand on the field.
📸 Michael Kunkel - Bongarts
For this, the Kaiser relied on his greatest strength, his charm. "He could talk so well - if you let him open his mouth once, it was over," even the friendly Brazilian legend Bebeto admitted. Contacts like these open many doors for Raposo - especially to nightclubs.
"Every night I was out in nightclubs until the early hours of the morning - from Monday to Monday. Honestly, I was never in a condition to train or play in the morning," the night owl confessed after his "career". If he was sober in the morning, the big drawer of excuses was opened.
So the cunning guy persuaded young players to knock him down. He repeatedly claimed before match days that his grandmother had died and therefore he couldn't play. He bribed sports journalists for positive headlines about him to sign up with a new club. A dentist regularly issued him certificates, which found reasons for his invented injuries.
Naturally, his employers never put up with this for long. "All the teams I played for cheered twice - when I arrived and when I left," Raposo joked aptly about his career in the British 'Sun' in 2018.
Part of his clever plan was also to sign short-term contracts. Only to immediately pretend to have muscular problems and then convince the club management to give him a contract until the end of the season, so he had time to get fit and show himself.
In 1988, however, his clean record seemed to be getting dirty. Carlos Kaiser was employed by Bangu at the time. During a game, he was sent to warm up because he was supposed to be substituted. Instead of playing a little later, he started a wild brawl in the stands.
What looked like the result of a spontaneous action was planned long in advance. Because the Kaiser knew: To have his peace in the west of Rio de Janeiro, he needed the club patron on his side. At that time, this was Castor de Andrade, a notorious mafia boss.
So after the game, the shirker sought contact and claimed that the opposing fans had slandered Andrade as a crook. He successfully sold the tumults in the stands as a defense of Andrade's honor. Instead of being thrown out, the troublemaker was rewarded with double salary and a contract extension of six months.
Until 1992, Raposo then bluffed his way through three more clubs. Then his facade began to crumble. Influential companions retired from football, technical progress exposed his fake injuries. At the age of 29, the Kaiser's journey through football ended. He will be unforgettable - and that without a single appearance.
This article was translated into English by Artificial Intelligence. You can read the original version in 🇩🇪 here.
📸 Simone Arveda - 2024 Getty Images
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Capos, ‘soft hooligans' and a lot of noise – the rise of away fans in women's football
Capos, ‘soft hooligans' and a lot of noise – the rise of away fans in women's football

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Capos, ‘soft hooligans' and a lot of noise – the rise of away fans in women's football

Even before Finland's group match against 2025 European Championship hosts Switzerland kicked off, Melissa Platt's voice is almost gone. She's acting as 'capo' for Finland's fans, leading their chants on the walk to the Stade de Geneve and then inside it, and has underestimated how loud it would be. 'Switzerland was expecting 10,000-12,000 fans for their fan walk. We were expecting 150 Finnish fans,' Platt, who moved to Finland from the United States almost 20 years ago, says. 'We were thinking, 'How are we going to create some kind of atmosphere? We're going to be totally drowned out'. Somehow that didn't happen.' As the procession made its way to the stadium south of central Geneva, Platt decided to take what she expected to be a short walk to the rear of the assembled group of Finland supporters. 'I just kept walking back and back and back. It felt like I was walking forever with these Finnish fans, and yelling, with my voice hoarse, but going, 'Louder! Suomi!' (the Finnish word for Finland). It was great. People were so responsive and hyped for it.' In the end, she gave up on reaching the back of the crowd. There were just too many people. This summer's tournament has made significant progress in attracting travelling supporters to Switzerland. UEFA, European football's governing body, said before the tournament kicked off that 35 per cent of the match tickets were bought by international customers. The record for the most away fans at a single women's Euros game was broken this month with 17,000 Germany supporters attending their win over Denmark in Basel, a city within walking distance of the Swiss-German border, in the group stage. The tournament-record crowd for a group match not involving the host country — 22,596 watching the Netherlands vs Switzerland at Sheffield United's Bramall Lane in 2022 — has been bettered on six occasions, with the 34,165 at that Germany-Denmark game the largest. It is not only fans of historically successful footballing nations who have travelled. Finland, who have not progressed past the Euros' group stage since 2009, and Wales, making their major tournament debut, each brought thousands of vocal supporters. The Football Association of Finland estimates at least 1,000 Finns attended each of their three group games, while the Football Association of Wales says around 7,000 Welsh fans travelled to Switzerland for their first taste of a major women's competition. Switzerland's central location within Europe and the travel arrangements put in place for Euro 2025 are partly behind this increase. Free return matchday travel to the stadium involved from anywhere in the host nation by public transport is included in the price of match tickets — a welcome concession in an otherwise expensive country. Germany used a similar scheme when it staged the men's version of this tournament last summer. The ticket pricing structure, ranging from 25 Swiss francs (£23, $32, €27) for the cheapest group matches to 90 (£84, $114, €96) for the most expensive seats for the final, has helped, too. Twenty-two of 31 matches were sold out before the start of the competition and Germany's semi-final with Spain saw a tournament record set for cumulative attendance: 623,088. The final is a 34,250 sell-out. St Jakob-Park in Basel, the venue for that final, is Switzerland's largest football stadium, but Sunday's fixture cannot come close to breaking the Women's Euros final attendance record set at 90,000-capacity Wembley in London three years earlier, with 87,192 in the crowd that day as England beat Germany. Accessibility is important but, as Swedish fan Estrid Kjellman pointed out, it isn't everything: 'You don't want people to just go because it's easy or free; you want people to want to come and want to chant and sing for their team. You need to have passionate engagement.' When Kjellman attended her first major women's tournament, Euro 2017 in the Netherlands, she thought: 'Where is everyone?' 'It was just so silent, there were no Swedish people (at Sweden's games), there were no pre-match gatherings, there was nothing organised at all around the fans, except for the Dutch fans. I wanted to be loud, I wanted to be fun, I wanted to be engaging and interactive.' Kjellman decided to set up a fans' group called Soft Hooligans, so named because at the time their loud cheering was so unusual they were looked at 'like we were hooligans'. At Zurich's Stadion Letzigrund, for their team's eventual penalty shootout defeat by England in the quarter-finals, those in Sweden's luminous yellow shirts were outnumbered. It did not matter though, as Kjellman and company drowned out their English counterparts over three tense hours of football. There was bouncing, drumming, singing, even a call-and-response chant with another group of Swedish fans sitting in another part of the stadium in the second half. Their noise only dipped after the shootout was over — they had remained loud after England, from 2-0 down, scored twice in three minutes late on to force extra time. Even then, they were prepared, producing huge banners in tribute to the head coach, Peter Gerhardsson, whose time in charge of the team would end when their involvement in the tournament did. They read, 'You are the one shining' – a modification of lyrics from Gerhardsson's favourite musical artist, Joakim Thastrom — and 'Thank you so, so, so much Peter'. It was a far cry from the atmosphere Kjellman experienced eight years ago in the Netherlands. Speaking to The Athletic before the quarter-finals, she said the number of away fans at these Euros had been 'next level'. The next big tournament in women's football, the 2027 World Cup, will be out of reach for many European fans as it is being played in Brazil, but should attract supporters from across North and South America. That will be followed by Euro 2029, the host nation for which will be announced in December, and the 2035 World Cup, in the UK — England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The question for all three of those tournaments is how they can build on the numbers and the noise seen and heard in Switzerland over these past few weeks. 'It's been really positive to see the atmosphere created,' says Deborah Dilworth, head of women's football at the UK's Football Supporters' Association. 'We have had a dedicated England section here — if I look back to the World Cup (in Australia and New Zealand in 2023), it was disjointed, and so the visibility of England fans and the capacity to make noise was strained. 'This time around, there's at least 2,000 in a block of fans that are all England fans, all singing. The administration has helped the atmosphere.' Dilworth says the organisation of fan walks, pre-match meetups and supporter embassies (which can help travellers with issues such as lost passports or broken phones) are positives, too: 'Fans are being supported as they travel, which is what will make people come back.' Platt emphasises the importance of tournament organisers and national associations working with fans to help create an atmosphere. '(Supporters) are going to want to do things like having a capo or a chant leader in the front,' she says. 'The Finnish association facilitated us being able to create the atmosphere there by making sure we knew what kind of certification we needed for our banners, making sure that we could bring in the drums. 'Having this kind of structured support is a critical way of growing the game.' Dilworth wants organisers to consult with fans about what helps them travel, and to consider the specific needs of a women's football audience. In Switzerland this summer, one debate has been over bringing water into stadiums. For some of the tournament's first matches, which took place as a heatwave hit the region, fans were able to take in their own drinks. However, Dilworth feels the rules could have been relaxed further to reflect the needs of crowds which could include menopausal women or families with small children — and that she thinks are also less likely to use those bottles as missiles than their equivalent at a tournament in the men's game. 'I know there's a logistical challenge sometimes, but I do think sometimes (the approach is), 'Well, it's football and it's a stadium', instead of thinking things through for the audience that you're welcoming in,' she says. The question is no longer whether people will turn out to watch international football competitions in the women's game, or travel to another country to do so. It is now what organisers are going to do to a) keep them coming back for future editions, and b) make the atmosphere better still. '(The support) is growing, but there's still a lot that can be done,' Kjellman said. 'A lot will change before the next World Cup and the next Euros,' she smiles. 'And I think it will become even louder.' This article originally appeared in The Athletic. England, Wales, Finland, Sweden, International Football, Women's Soccer, Culture, Women's Euros, Women's World Cup 2025 The Athletic Media Company

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