Opinion – Renata Mendonça: Cruzeiro bets on something new with Ronaldo, and São Paulo sinks with old owners

The announcement that Ronaldo bought 90% of Cruzeiro’s shares had repercussions worldwide in recent days. Thus, the celestial club became, officially, the first of the elite of Brazilian football with an “owner”. And the owner couldn’t be a more interesting character. Simply, the Phenomenon.

It is not yet known whether this operation will be successful or not, but expectations are the size of the repercussion that the news had. The SAF do Cruzeiro will be a different experience for Brazilian football and many people are still wondering if this is the way to save the financially broken clubs: handing them over to investors, majority shareholders or, ultimately, owners.

But those who think that Brazilian football had no “owners” before that are wrong. Because big clubs are big “associations” in theory, but small manors in practice. And these owners are even worse, because they don’t carry any legal responsibility for the breaches and disasters they cause and leave in the clubs they say they support.

What happened with Cruzeiro on Saturday made me reflect on what had just happened with São Paulo the day before, on Friday. One meeting promoted the most backward, and most cowardly, status change ever seen in recent times in Brazilian football.

Cowardly because, fearing protests, the leaders decided to hold the meeting online with the excuse of concern about the pandemic. This is a huge concern, as can be seen this weekend when Julio Casares and his cronies met in person at a barbecue to celebrate the year and the blow that his administration dealt by approving this undemocratic statute.

São Paulo does not have a formal owner, as Cruzeiro now has with Ronaldo. But there are some owners who, little by little, have been taking a club back.

Among the items approved in the reform of the statute are reelection, to benefit Júlio Casares himself, who one day was against this measure —but, after he came to power, curiously changed his opinion; increase in the term of directors, which now has no reelection limit; and the most surreal: permission for political persecution of anyone who threatens “moral integrity” or “social harmony”, with loss of the right to vote.

São Paulo is one of the few big clubs in Brazil that does not allow the participation of partner-fans in its election. The voice of the fans, who even protested against the change in statute, was summarily ignored. All items to be discussed and voted on at this meeting were being maintained
in secrecy and were only revealed by the brilliant work of journalists such as Pedro Lopes, from UOL, and Rodrigo Capelo, from Grupo Globo.

The latter wrote the book “Football as it is”, in which the first chapter mentions some cases that made São Paulo be revered as a “modern” club in the past. The construction of the Morumbi stadium, the creation of its own Training Center, the leading role in the first negotiation of TV rights for a championship here, all of this showed how much São Paulo saw, before many other clubs, that football needed an increasingly professional treatment.

The same names mentioned there as references for this “modernity” are part of the club’s political context to this day. Carlos Miguel Aidar, Leco, Júlio Casares… The last three presidents of São Paulo were the club’s protagonists for 40, 50 years, and they are still there — with the difference that they stopped in time, as well as the São Paulo that they commanded/command recently.

With these “owners”, São Paulo is getting closer and closer to sinking.