A Soccer Con Man Who Couldn't Play the Game

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/soccers-ultimate-con-man-was-a-superstar-who-couldnt-play-the-game

by dluan • 10 years ago

183 106 10 years ago

dmoy• 10 years ago

Wow that's wild.

I guess it's nice to learn that despite technology opening up the doors to so many other cons, it also closes the doors to some older avenues. I'd venture a guess that the former significantly outweighs the latter, which is too bad, but oh well.

kazinator3• 10 years ago

It's surprising that he wasn't uncovered through player stats. If a newspaper headline hints about someone's scoring ability, wouldn't a few people get curious and look up the actual stats in some soccer almanac to see how good it is. Maybe that data wasn't easy to come by. In any sport that supports a national stats-gathering bureaucracy, that would be hard to get away with. E.g. baseball in the USA: you know everyone's "batting average" and so on. (Not to mention that when players are traded, the teams or clubs have access to this info!)

flukus3• 10 years ago

He probably was. Why announce it to the world and give up your competitive advantage in betting markets?

galuggus• 10 years ago

Player stats are a really American thing.

jjnoakes2• 10 years ago

It's hard to believe that no rumors were circulated among the players or coaches of different teams, or at least, they were never strong enough for a single person to investigate seriously. Especially with the amount of money they must have been paying for nothing.

Although I guess if the fans are happy, the money is well spent...?

mathattack2• 10 years ago

Repeat con men thrive on their victims being too embarrassed to publicly call them out.

jjnoakes2• 10 years ago

I'm not talking about publicly calling anyone out. I'm surprised the coaches and players on teams taking him in didn't hear enough rumors from the coaches and players on the teams he was leaving to make them suspicious enough to investigate his ability themselves (or even watch him work the ball for more than a few seconds).

RubyPinch• 10 years ago

It might of been like, when he was starting out, no one really cared to look, after he was famous, anyone who noticed anything would of just assumed it was a stint of bad luck, otherwise he wouldn't be famous!

caseysoftware• 10 years ago

There's an emperor looking for his new clothes too..

wnevets• 10 years ago

Reminds me the story of the con man who tried to buy the Islanders. People were told he was rich and just believed whatever terrible excuse he came up with about why he didn't have the money. "If he wasn't rich how'd he make it this far? Surely someone must've checked"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Spano

notahacker2• 10 years ago

I wouldn't be surprised to learn that he earned little or no money from most of his clubs, posing as an injured player desperately hoping to resurrect his career who was willing to train with them on a contract structured mostly on a pay-as-you-play basis. I suspect his limitations as a footballer were slightly exaggerated too: Brazilian Wikipedia records him as having made 15 appearances for Fluminense, one of Brazil's bigger clubs, at one stage of his career. As for the fans, I doubt many of them cared about or even knew the name of a free transfer signing in the reserve squad.

That theory doesn't fit with the narrative that well, but if there's one thing we know for sure about him it's that he knows how to spin a good story to the media.

icebraining• 10 years ago

Not sure if the Wikipedia page is true; it has no reference for the 15 appearances, as far as I can tell. Globo[1] says he only lasted a week in Fluminense.

[1] http://globoesporte.globo.com/futebol/noticia/2011/05/briga-...

tome• 10 years ago

Perhaps Carlos's greatest con was persuading the world he was a great conman.

busyant• 10 years ago

Agreed. Playing on a 2nd division French team is not indicative of a brilliant con.

Also, some of the information in the article strains credulity: Without balls to practice with, the team was restricted to doing a physical training session. They had no balls to train with?? I've seen some down-and-out footballers, and somebody always had an extra ball or two in the car.

soneca• 10 years ago

The players that are mentioned at the beginning of the article were very big shots, incredibly good and powerful players. They would basically run their teams. Romario, one of the greatest forwards of all time was known for "owning" the team. He, not the coach, would say who would play and who would be on the bench. Any antagonist would soon be fired or negotiated to other team.

And these guys most certainly knew he was a fraud. If i recall correctly, they outright admitted so in the brazilian articles I read about his guy. They just didn't care because he was part of the gang.

djhworld• 10 years ago

Reminds me a little of Ali Dia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Dia

Might not have been a con as such, but amusing none the less.

mzs• 10 years ago

Reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Keane

rexreed• 10 years ago

Wow - in reading about Walter Keane, I came across this old Life magazine article about his wife... but then I noticed all the OTHER articles in this magazine and I can't believe all the amazing stuff being written about here: a new AI bot from MIT and Stanford, the World Trade Center being built in NYC, computerization of India, Korea starting to manufacture semiconductors, and more... WOW: https://books.google.com/books?id=2FMEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA56-IA1#v...

rublev• 10 years ago

This reminds me of Elmyr de Hory. I watched him one of Orson Wells last movies "F for Fake" and I have no idea what to make of it.

raverbashing2• 10 years ago

Replace Soccer with pretty much anything and you can find similar examples. Yes, even in the IT field

yuncun• 10 years ago

Hard to fake injury tho

greedo• 10 years ago

With HIPAA, employers really can't ask too many questions, and with the ability to "work from home" you can hide easily. Eventually they catch on, but it takes awhile. I've worked with a network "engineer" who pulled in six figures, while doing basically nothing.

lordnacho2• 10 years ago

How many of you have not worked with someone whom you suspected of not being able to program, despite being paid to do so?

Here's a description of an ex colleague of mine:

- Asked me after 7 years about whether a system existed that could tell you the state of the code at a given time. You know, because it's inconvenient saving different versions in separate files.

- Can't do anything other than changing literals without breaking it.

- Can't tell you what the difference between an object and a class is.

- Pretends his job is higher level than coding.

- Since he can't do anything, goes to meetings explaining how he's the architect behind it all. And gets credit for it.

rdtsc3• 10 years ago

Yap saw it. A large company someone new hired. Hung around for about a year, managed to write 100 lines of code. Only 10 were ever accepted after peer review.

However come meeting time, would be very vocal about random technologies -- we'd talk about spawning a process and he'd chime in how you can do this complicated kernel trick with signals, or shared memory and whatnot. At first everyone was impressed. Heck, I was.

After a while nobody saw any results from him though. When came time to show his results he started to claim to have health issues. So was gone for a while.

After a couple of months the manager caught on and kept assigning him different tasks hoping they'd finally find something he's good at. Would get as simple task, yet instead of just doing it, he would re-frame as some complicated theoretical problem, which needed research and the solution needed something like P vs NP solved in order to deliver it. Not sure if someone in the end explicitly told him that "Look Pete, it is a test function, just write the test function. You don't have to solve P vs NP to do it". (Pete is not his real name)

But yeah he was invited to depart, after collected a nice salary for about a year. He's probably at another company now doing the same thing.

dunkelheit• 10 years ago

Similarly, impossibility results in distributed systems theory can act as a pretty good cover. Something along the lines of "You know, in a distributed setting you cannot distinguish node failure from delays in communication. So no, I won't be writing monitoring scripts for this service. They will be useless."

Radim• 10 years ago

Oh man, this brings back memories...

There was this company (shall remain nameless) where the product was always "around the corner". Just one more week or two! Yes it doesn't work right now, but these are minor things, let us iron out the final bugs!

This went on for almost two years.

Leadership being non-technical, they didn't know whether what the "technical team" was telling them is true or not. They couldn't check, but were not idiots, so eventually suspected bullshit. So they hired us as "crisis consultants", to do an audit and put things back on track.

Needless to say, we had to scrap everything. Which, it turns out, was about half a dozen unfinished PHP scripts and some apache configs... the result of ~4 man-years of work!

The main employee squirmed and lied and lashed back during meetings. Not a pleasant experience at all. For anyone involved. When the true horror of the situation became apparent, they had to be let go.

Of course, this "worked out" only because we had the leadership's full backing (they really felt more shameful than angry, on account of their mismanagement), and because we could stand our ground technically. Now what to do if you're a grunt employee, without good access to leadership, observing such bullshit unfold... difficult. Chances are, the bullshitters are better at politics & smooth talking than you are, so confrontations are risky.

infectoid• 10 years ago

After a couple of months the manager caught on and kept assigning him different tasks hoping they'd finally find something he's good at.

This is exactly the reaction I'd expect from a good manager. Work the problem and see if you can fix it instead of blaming people for things.

I suppose I'm always willing to give people the benefit of the doubt, but of course only to a point.

the_cat_kittles• 10 years ago

former js coworker: "i cant populate that dropdown with the results of an ajax request because everything is 'async' in javascript"

ctvo• 10 years ago

Current co-worker, a contractor, on a remote project wrote 1000+ lines of JS to load a JSON file in Node (he didn't realize he could just require it).

vonmoltke4• 10 years ago

How many of you have not worked with someone whom you suspected of not being able to program, despite being paid to do so?

I haven't, and I don't understand how people like that get and retain jobs without having some other "in" to exploit the system.

babuskov• 10 years ago

I don't understand how people like that get...

Their resume is so good. They worked at top companies. Nobody wants to insult them with some simple test of programming basics during interview, so they rather ask them what was it like working in the Big Companies. After some chit-chat, they get the job. The company thinks they're lucky to have hired someone that smart.

...and retain jobs

Inertia, lack of communication inside the company, etc. Those people are usually also very friendly and soon learn who reports to whom and how to hide the fact that they aren't contributing anything useful.

abritinthebay2• 10 years ago

It's especially common when they used to work at a "famous" company.

Some real world examples: in the mid-2000s being a "Googler" was a straight pass by some to thinking you were some wizz-bang amazing programmer. Because Google only hired the best and brightest, right?

Then you work with some of them and realize they they were nothing more than a smart college kid who got lucky with who hired them and were terrible programmers. They were juniors at best, but now with the ego of RMS.

The same happened for a while with "Game Producers" from Zynga, when they were riding high and had a better reputation. The trouble was that Zynga had a policy of rapid promotion so you got "Producers" and "Studio Leads" who couldn't last 5 minutes outside of Zynga. That wasn't always the case, but it happened enough that it actually became something of a black mark in the industry.

johnloeber• 10 years ago

And gets credit for it.

You let him get credit for 7 years?

lordnacho2• 10 years ago

When you're in the trenches, it's often hard to know what's being presented externally.

andrewfong• 10 years ago

Pretty much why FizzBuzz is a thing: https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/

rjbwork• 10 years ago

Yep. At my last company we'd ask people to write an integer parser, and a task that required some very basic LINQ - a join, group by, and select.

We saw everything from completely non-functional code, to doesn't handle negatives or signal failures/triply nested for-loops respectively(partial credit OFC), to picture perfect code w/ multiple tests.

Obviously weighted very far to "completely non-functional code". It boggles my mind the amount of "programmers" who literally can't.

EnderMB• 10 years ago

When I was a recent graduate, I was thrown into becoming the lead developer for a product at a startup after my boss left to become a Java dev.

The workload was enough that we needed to hire another developer, so we lined up a couple of people for interviews. As the most senior technical person on the team (with two whole years experience) it fell to me to try and hire someone. I had barely had any technical interviews, let alone interviewed someone, so I did what anyone who read Jeff Atwood's blog would do. I used FizzBuzz.

Then and now, I still feel it's a poor way to judge someone's programming ability. It judges your ability to know the modulus operator above anything else. However, it did seem to weed out most of the people who came for the job. We had people with eight years experience and significant experience in what we did that couldn't get as far as the for-loop. I asked a couple of super basic questions to judge their knowledge (how do you guys deploy code at your current job? difference between a class and an object? etc), and nearly everyone answered these, but FizzBuzz was solved by only one person, even when they were allowed to use any language they want. We ended up hiring this guy, and he's still there (well, at the company they acquired them shortly after I left). We're still friends, and I consider him to be a rock solid developer whom I would hire again.

I've not used it since, but I've worked with a number of developers in the past few years that have walked into a job with nothing more than a CV of impressive words and a memorised list of answers to the kind of questions you see on the first page of a "developer interview questions" Google search. My favoured approach has been a relaxed conversation in a cafe and a task to build something, done either at home or in the office, but I often wonder whether I'd be better off just going back to FizzBuzz.

boyter• 10 years ago

Yes, but not actually a programmer. The guy was hired to be a project manager.

After joining things were as expected but after a few weeks we noticed that he was rarely around after lunch and never around after lunch on a Friday.

We would email him at those times deliberately to catch him out and I recall starting to put sticky notes on his laptop "Came to see you a X time". He would come back and just dump all the notes in the rubbish and claim he never got them. He would often claim to be working from home, despite his laptop being on his desk and usually closed. He would also never responding during those times to email or IM.

A classic seagull manager he would appear when something went wrong, making a lot of noise, writing a lot of emails and then vanishing. He would also be sure to be seen when something was delivered often staying back late on those times.

It got so bad one friend of mine started tracking when he was around and then tracking when one of his relatives died. During his tenure the following incidents occurred,

- Hot water system blew up. 4 times. He had pictures which he would show all the time.

- Uncles, aunts, and various over family members died to the total of 20 individuals.

- Our time tracking him showed him to be in the office less than 15 hours a week on average.

We started to suspect he had a second job and was pulling the same con on them. This was never proved, but we did find someone who had worked with him previously and they reported the same behavior.

The worst thing was it was raised with management at least several dozen times and nothing ever happened. He managed to pull this scam off for 4 years. I could not believe the waste of money this guy was, literally $500,000 burnt on a useless individual.

buserror• 10 years ago

Just at the last job, I was hired at the same time as another 'senior' guy. It took me all of 2 hours in the job to realize he was completely incompetent.

I requested a meeting with the director, and explained to him that despite being very new in the job, I suspected the guy was indeed completely incompetent, didn't have any experience of what we were working on and that me being an expert, it was pretty easy for me to realize he didn't know anything about what he was talking about. I emailed him proof that he had at least lied about the work he had done on a task... But the guy still managed to survive the first 3 months, so was 'hired'...

I told the director that I couldn't work with him at all, as I thought he was just a hindrance -- I emailed several times detailed reports to show he was completely incompetent at programming, and was just lying about stuff he did do....

The guy still stayed 18 months in the company, and he eventually left by himself.

After he left, I inherited his 'work' and proved in about 20 minutes that he had completely faked a demo he had done of a feature he was supposed to work on... The code wasn't there at all, they had been conned.

Thing is, said guy probably picked up some extra lingua to put into his CV for the next 'job' he'll go into...

golergka• 10 years ago

I was such a guy for a while.

I actually can program, and implemented some stuff in that company (moving the whole codebase from svn to git and educating everyone, for example). But then I got into depression because of family issues, and just couldn't write a single line of code for an entire month. I kept giving excuses, inventing all kind of bullshit to cover it, and felt even more depressed because of it — so when they finally fired me, I was relieved.

Now when I see guys who're doing this all the time, I can't help but imagine what's going through their head all the time and in what an awful state they must be in.

dajohnson89• 10 years ago

At risk of being called overly-PC, I must point out that the opening sentence is could be seen as objectifying women:

Brazilian soccer star Carlos Kaiser had it all: exclusive contracts with popular teams, money, fame, and women.

I normally don't point out things like this, because hyper-sensitivity to things that are often considered "offensive" when they really aren't can be annoying. But I can't see how to interpret this other than "women" being a possession.

To be fair, the author isn't likely being malicious, and I think he just means that he's receiving the attention of lots of women. Such attention is, arguably, an "object" in the sense of a commodity in the social marketplace ("that guy has a lot of women" is often seen as a compliment whether you like it or not). But still, I'm surprised at how much the author's choice of words bothered me. I don't even identify as a feminist in the traditional sense....shrug.

gakada• 10 years ago

Are you saying the author is being unfair on the average footballer by implying that they objectify women? :)

Normal_gaussian4• 10 years ago

Whilst I have friends I don't own them. I endeavour to obtain more friends, and I judge people as to whether they would be the kind of friend that I want - short or long term.

To describe somebody as 'having' women is often accurate and useful - I do not see why this should be penalised.

Now what does confuse and upset me is the way in which we rarely describe women as being able to have lots of men - the slut problem.

Enjoying regular sex and really exploring it, like any other hobby, seems incredibly reasonable. Hoping to enjoy lots of sex sounds like something anybody should want, and I don't see why this is limited as a descriptor for men only.

In short, pretty much everybody likes a good fucking - why are we afraid to say it?

kajecounterhack11• 10 years ago

  To describe somebody as 'having' women is often accurate 
  and useful - I do not see why this should be penalised.

Can you also see that someone might find this language offensive? That 'having a woman' is somehow vernacular but you don't really see women being described as having 'money, fame, men' ?

The language makes women sound like they are possessions.

jimmyk6• 10 years ago

Now what does confuse and upset me is the way in which we rarely describe women as being able to have lots of men - the slut problem.

We do describe women, in a positive way, as being able to have lots of men -- we just call them suitors. We correctly identify that having lots of men that want to marry you is a rare gift, and that having lots of women that want to have sex with you is a rare gift. Having casual sex with a lot of men is not a difficult feat to achieve, so why would you expect anyone to glorify anyone for being able to do it?

kajecounterhack11• 10 years ago

Why is this downvoted? Can someone explain? If you disagree with this assessment maybe respond with rationale rather than disagreeing by downvote.

  I must point out that the opening sentence is could be
  seen as objectifying women

This seems to be a valid point to make.

If you object to the relevance of this, you may be wise to consider there are female readers on HN and be gently reminded that the software community has a diversity & inclusiveness problem.

yongjik• 10 years ago

Probably because this thread has a very good chance of becoming an off-topic flamewar.

(I didn't downvote, by the way.)

Pitarou2• 10 years ago

In the context, I would take "[he had] women" to be shorthand for "[he had] sexual access to women he thought desirable". Maybe that commodifies them, but this probably reflects the attitude of a young Brazilian footballer more than it reflects the attitude of the author.

rdtsc3• 10 years ago

This applies to the startup scene.

I have seen it first hand, someone managed to convince a few investors who were old and not very quick thinking that they should invest in his company.

The product idea was just awkward and made up. It was as if someone is given a 5 minute task to quickly think of a startup idea.

But he was a good smooth talker, so millions of dollars later down the drain, with a private office in the Valley, he can now claim he was a serial entrepreneur, CEO, mentor. He'd go to all meetups and give talks. Would publish a blog post here and there so he was also an "author".

Every time he was asked to present his product or asked when it was going to be shipped, he'd claim he saw this trendy technology at a meetup (last was some container thing) and claimed he needed to rewrite his stack using that to go "faster". That lasted for close to 5 years.

People claim it was a failure. I claim it was a major success for him. He's probably off to the next adventure. Not bad overall. Ride the hype and you'll make it!

betolink• 10 years ago

I totally see this not only in the startup scene but life in general! in every trade there is a charlatan that will fake mastery of the skills needed to succeed.

rrecuero• 10 years ago

I have definitely seen this happening as well. Being the hype and cool factor of startups, wantrepreneurs are sprouting everywhere. It is usually easy to spot them, all talk and nothing to show.

67726e• 10 years ago

Just quit a job working for a guy exactly like that. He worked it for three years, and he damn well might make it last longer. In my case we had a fully working product. You could have sold the fuck out of it but instead we always needed a different UI. Instead he spends his time playing on the company card at the bar or spending his time on every local interest group board. All while "payroll glitches" left the only people working unpaid. It's sick.

toadi• 10 years ago

What a choice of words. Being old should is not the cause of being swindled. Maybe inexperienced which is aggravated by being old as you should have more experience.

Bit the same for quick thinking. Learned quick thinking many times result in sloppy thinking.

So maybe the investors were just not fit to be investors at what ever age?

rdtsc3• 10 years ago

What a choice of words. Being old should is not the cause of being swindled. Maybe inexperienced which is aggravated by being old as you should have more experience.

Sorry it did sound bad the way I put it. But I've know the group of people for 10 years or so and have seen decline in their decision making in that time. It might not be true in general but it seemed like it was true there.

At some point they stopped following technology. So someone friendly and smooth talking who knows how to throw some technical / startup terms came and took their money. They also thought of thesmelves as little Mark Cubans or Marc Andreessens. Someone knowing how to play to that image was well positioned to trick them.

ivanca• 10 years ago

...yeah, lets pretende Alzheimer and every other brain disease directly related to age doesn't exist.

fauria• 10 years ago

There are some stories where reality surpass fiction. In addition to this, I found the story of Frédéric Bourdin to be hard to beleive yet real. The 2012 documentary The Imposter tells the story in an astounding way: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1966604/

NTDF9• 10 years ago

You see this everywhere. I saw this in school. Some kids got good grades but really knew jack shit. The grades were a result of memorizing, cheating, plagiarizing assignments, great rapport with professor and TA, great recommendations.

All this and now, working at top tech company.

tedmiston• 10 years ago

Interesting that the article is almost a section by section copy of his Wikipedia page.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Kaiser_(footballer)

zumu• 10 years ago

Somehow fitting...

BoozerDoozer• 10 years ago

I find this story very hard to believe or grossly exaggerated. I mean this is soccer we're talking about, not brain surgery. If you plucked a random reasonably healthy person who had never seen a soccer ball in his/her life off any street in America say, and put them in a pro club with a contract and daily training with other pros, that person would probably become a reasonably good soccer player. Was it really harder for him to just, well you know, play than to fake it for 20 something odd years?

flukus3• 10 years ago

Apparently you are completely unaware of just how highly skilled they players are at this level. If anyone could do it they would, it's a highly desirable career.

jwdunne• 10 years ago

This is correct. Football is "our thing" in the UK. Even in high school, some kids just had a knack for it and could run rings around everyone. There was no amount of training you could do to catch up to them. None of these kids went on to play professional football - they weren't good enough.

advertising• 10 years ago

My favorite of all is the story of Elmyr de Hory who was the greatest art forger of all time. Something like $60million or more worth of fake art sold in his lifetime? Some of his Picasso's and others they say still hang in museums too afriad to admit they are fakes.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elmyr_de_Hory

Orsen Welles did a great movie on him and fakery in general - http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gIVgUjj6RxU

The question of who are the real fakers in the art world, the forger or the critics who are duped and swear that a painting is authentic.

The tragedy of Elymr was that he was a great painter but no one cared for his original works and he was much more successful as a forger. The same for Clifford Irving, ironically, who wrote Elymr's biography.

Irving wrote a fake biography of Howard Hues or something along those lines.

billforsternz• 10 years ago

At the lower tiers of the professional game, Brazilian footballers have an advantage in foreign markets because their nationality has a kind of soccer mystique. I can't find the exact quote, it was from an agent, saying it was easier to place a mediocre Brazilian than a brilliant Mexican (Somewhere in the book "Futebol: The Brazilian Way of Life" by Alex Bellos). I know my local (second, third, maybe nth) tier professional team were very proud of three Brazilians, apparently obtained as a job lot. They came complete with single word names etc. After watching them play I was pretty sure the aquisition strategy was to pick three random twenty something dudes off the street of Sao Paulo or similar! These guys are sure to be good enough to play professionally in New Zealand right! To be fair one of the three could play and he made a decent career in Wellington. Daniel was his name if I remember correctly.

It looks like this guy took some advantage of this "Brazilian factor", although it hardly explains his stints at huge clubs like Botafogo etc. in Brazil itself!

B1FF_PSUVM• 10 years ago

Any chance this piece itself is a fake?

(Asking for a friend, as they say.)

A Soccer Con Man Who Couldn't Play the Game

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