adminNEW YORK — Fans yearning for the return of professional football have spent months watching classic matches, obsessing over “contact training” schedules and adopting teams from far-flung leagues that play in empty stadiums.
Amazon Prime’s new series “El Presidente,” out yesterday, provides a much-needed football fix — but its witheringly satirical take on the 2015 “Fifagate” corruption scandal may leave supporters questioning whether the return of the beautiful game is a good thing after all.
“It was crazy what was going on, no?” said series creator and writer Armando Bo.
“Not just FIFA . . . the corruption scandal was so huge, the FBI wanted to show they were the good guys . . . Everyone wanted to be part of it. So many hands on this super huge business.”
The US$150 million bribery scandal that rocked the football world with the arrests of dozens of soccer executives — many of them Latin American — culminated in the downfall of FIFA boss Sepp Blatter.
“El Presidente” tells the story through the eyes of Sergio Jadue, a young Chilean who improbably rose from the front office of a humble local club to the vice presidency of CONMEBOL, South American football’s governing body.
Filmed mainly in Spanish with subtitles, its depiction of a naive but ambitious character getting swept up in an international criminal world of bribery, fraud and even violence is reminiscent of Netflix’s hit drama “Narcos.”
“I guess it’s different, football and drugs — for me, the big challenge was there’s not so much blood,” joked Bo, who won an Oscar for co-writing 2014’s black comedy “Birdman.”
“This kind of mafia is more difficult. In ‘Narcos,’ you can just kill everyone and that’s it. It’s real. Here, people didn’t die – not too many.”
Amazon will hope “El Presidente” —co-produced by Gaumont, the same French firm behind “Narcos” — enjoys the same global appeal as that show.
Hopping between countries and following a US undercover agent who tracked Jadue and his co-conspirators, the series is “really local but also really meaningful in every country,” said Bo.
“And it’s an era when subtitles are allowed, no?” added the Argentine. “We are seeing international content in the American market, after ‘Narcos,’ after ‘Parasite,’ even ‘Roma.’
“We are seeing that stories need to be told in the language that is more natural, more real, more credible.”
A football fan who adores Lionel Messi, Bo admits it can be painful to look behind the curtain at the greed and corruption rampant in the world’s most popular sport.
The show is narrated from beyond the grave by Julio Grondona, the real-life veteran Argentine soccer boss.
Grondona’s character highlights the vast contrast between fans’ unadulterated passion for “the World Cup people see” and the true “business World Cup” — an unrivalled cash machine for those pulling the strings.
Glamorous events like the Brazil 2014 World Cup and Chile’s historic Copa America victory on home soil the following year take a back seat to grubby TV rights deals.
But at a time when the world is locked down, the success of shows like Michael Jordan documentary “The Last Dance” demonstrates a pent-up appetite for the stories behind famous past sporting dramas, Bo said.
“We are experiencing now so many things that we need to question about ourselves as a society,” he added.
“But I’m a big sports fan, and when it’s back, I will be there watching for sure.” Blatter mentioned on Tuesday that one Swiss investigation into his dealing with of a television contract had been dropped but FIFA SAID that doesn’t imply he has been cleared.
“I was officially informed today that the federal public prosecutor’s office has decided . . . to close the investigation,” Blatter, who is 84, told AFP on Tuesday.
“This news is already a good thing and above all it comes exactly five years to the day after my decision to vacate my mandate as president of FIFA.”
Blatter quit on June 2, 2015, just four days after winning a fifth term as FIFA president. The Swiss attorney general has thus shelved one of the two parts of the proceedings opened against Blatter in 2015 on “suspicion of unfair management and breach of trust”.
It made clear that the other investigation, into a payment of two million Swiss francs (1.88 million euros) to Michel Platini, the former Uefa president and Fifa executive committee member, was ongoing.
Fifa have 10 days to appeal.
A spokesman for the governing body of world football told AFP that they had not yet received formal notification but “will consider all legal options to ensure that the relevant people are held to account.” Blatter’s payment to Platini led to both men being banned from football, although the Frenchman was cleared by the Swiss courts in 2018.
At the end of April, a police report obtained by AFP said that the suspicions of “unfair management” against Blatter “were well-founded” even though the decision to close one of the two investigations was already known.
The investigation that has been dropped centres on a contract Blatter approved awarding TV rights for two World Cups at a price allegedly below market value to the Caribbean Football Union, then headed by Jack Warner.
Trinidadian Warner, a former FIFA executive committee member, has since been banned from football for life and is wanted in the United States.
Blatter acted “more in Warner’s interests than in the interests of FIFA,” wrote Swiss investigators. — AFP.
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