How a French journalist created FIFA and a Brazilian turned the World Cup into a billion-dollar market.

How a French journalist created FIFA and a Brazilian turned the World Cup into a billion-dollar market.

FIFA started small; it wasn’t born wealthy, nor did it seem destined to rule world football. In 1904, in a room in Paris, a 28-year-old French journalist created a small organization to organize a sport that was still in its infancy. His name was Robert Guérin. He founded FIFA, but he didn’t turn it into an empire.

Seventy years later, in Frankfurt, a Brazilian did what the British thought impossible. João Havelange was about to defeat Stanley Rous, president of an entity the European elite treated as its own. Rous seemed unshakeable, British, respected, a symbol of an old order. Until the votes showed: 68 to 52.

The turning point was the realization that the World Cup wasn’t just a tournament, it was a global product, a spectacle capable of selling television, sponsorships, ratings, and influence to billions of people. Havelange understood that whoever controlled the Cup would control the largest emotional market on the planet. To get there, he traveled two-thirds of the world.

He campaigned in 86 countries. He sat down with leaders from Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. Countries that the European elite ignored, but which had just as much power at the ballot box. One vote. He transformed the forgotten into an alliance, then transformed the World Cup into a machine. Here’s the part that breaks the script.

Havelange didn’t come from poverty; he came from above. He was the son of an arms dealer, the heir to a wealthy family, and an Olympic athlete. He lost his father at 17 and learned to run a bus company. It was he who took over FIFA, created by a French journalist in Paris, and turned the World Cup into a billion-dollar market. The price would remain hidden in coffers, in secret contracts, and in bribes that would come to light decades later.

This is the story of how true power is built, and how the talent that transforms a game into an empire can corrode everything from within. If you enjoy empires away from the spotlight, subscribe to Dossiê Impérios and activate the bell. And let’s begin now. To understand the scope of Havelange’s achievement, we need to go back to the beginning—not to his beginning, but to the beginning of the institution itself.

And here lies the first surprise of this story. FIFA wasn’t born big, it wasn’t born rich, it wasn’t born powerful. It was born small, almost timid, in a borrowed room. May 21, 1904, Paris. At the headquarters of the Union of French Athletic Sports Societies, seven national associations met to establish a body to govern football.

France, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland. There was no empire in sight, no money. There was only the idea of ​​organizing a sport that was still in its infancy as an international phenomenon. The formal founder, the first president, was a French journalist named Robert Guérin.

He was 28 years old, and wrote for the newspaper Le Matin. And here’s the detail that defines it all. Guérin presided over this entity for only two years. Then he disappeared from history without building anything resembling an empire. He baptized the child, but he didn’t raise him. This is a crucial distinction.

There are those who found an institution and those who transform it into power. They are different things. Guérin founded. 70 years later, a Brazilian would transform it. And the difference between the two men lies not in their talent for founding, but in their ability to see what no one else saw.

The world of football, during those early decades, was an amateur world, run by European gentlemen who treated the sport as an extension of social clubs. It was organized, yes, it had rules, it had tournaments, but it had no idea what it could become. No one there thought of football as a market.

No one imagined that it could become one of the most powerful commercial engines on the planet. It needed someone from outside, someone who hadn’t been raised in that closed-club mentality, someone who could see the whole board and not just the pitch. And that someone was growing up on the other side of the ocean, in a family that had very little to do with European football.

Jean-Marie Faustin Goedefroid de Havelange was born on May 8, 1916, in Rio de Janeiro. And this is where we must be honest, because the truth is more interesting than the cliché. Havelange didn’t come from the bottom, he came from the top. His father, Faustin Havelange, was a Belgian immigrant originally from Liège, in the Walloon region.

He was a mining engineer and arms dealer. This is his father’s documented profession. An arms dealer. It was this trade that brought him to Brazil. And the family built a comfortable position. They owned a large estate that extended across the present-day neighborhoods of Laranjeiras, Cosme Velho, and Santa Teresa, in the heart of Rio de Janeiro.

According to biographers, Havelange’s father frequented the people who were in power in Brazil at the time. This detail is important, because young João didn’t just grow up with money; he grew up close to power. He learned early on how the corridors where decisions were made worked. He learned to observe who was in charge, how they were in charge, and why.

He studied at the Lycée Française, receiving a refined and cosmopolitan education. He spoke French, moved among various cultures, and then came the first turning point in his life. At 17, he lost his father and began working. This is the emotional crux of Havelange’s youth. It wasn’t poverty that shaped him, it was loss, the death of his father, who associated with the powerful, the sudden interruption of a path that seemed assured.

Suddenly, the heir had to demonstrate his ability to lead, to transform privilege into competence. And these are different things. Before being a manager, before being a leader, Havelange was an athlete, and not just any athlete. He was the youth champion in Rio de Janeiro with Fluminense in 1931. He was a swimmer and competed at Olympic level.

He swam at the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, those same games charged with political symbolism under the watchful eye of the Nazi regime. Years later, he would return to the Olympics, this time in water polo in Helsinki, in 1952. This explains a lot about the man he would become. Havelange knew the sport from the inside, the discipline of training, the pressure of competition, the geopolitics of the Olympics.

He wasn’t a bureaucrat who watched football from afar; he was someone who had been in the arena. But the school that truly shaped him as a leader wasn’t the swimming pool, it wasn’t the stadium, it was a bus company. And this is perhaps the most revealing quote of his entire career. He himself said that what he did at the CBD and FIFA, he learned at Cometa.

Viação Cometa, a transportation company he ran. Think about what that means. The man who would transform the world’s largest sports organization into a billion-dollar empire didn’t attribute his method to soccer, he attributed it to a bus company. It was there that he learned to manage people, costs, routes, logistics, and conflicts.

It was there that he learned to truly lead, the difference between giving orders and operating a complex machine. And it was here that his mindset began to emerge. Havelange understood that leading is a transferable skill, that the principles of leadership learned in a common, unglamorous activity could be applied to any power structure.

He didn’t separate the world of business from the world of sport. For him, it was all administration, all organization, all power. With this background, he rose through the Brazilian sports hierarchy until he became president of the Confederação Brasileira de Desportos, the old body that governed football in the country before the CBF.

And it was from there, from the leadership of a nation that breathed sport like no other, that he began to look up, toward the highest level, toward FIFA, run by Europeans who never imagined a South American would dare challenge the established order. It was then that the most brilliant strategy of his entire career began to take shape, because Havelange realized something the European establishment missed.

He looked at FIFA’s voting map and saw what no one else saw. Every national association had one vote. It didn’t matter whether it was a European football powerhouse or a small African country barely appearing in the sports news. A vote was a vote. And the Europeans, confident in their dominance, treated these smaller nations as irrelevant.

They didn’t court them, they didn’t listen to them. They simply assumed that power was rightfully theirs. Havelange did the opposite. He transformed the forgotten into his power base. He built an alliance with the countries of the so-called Third World—Asia, the Middle East, Africa. Nations that had never before received a visit from a FIFA presidential candidate.

Nations that had never been treated as if they mattered. He went to them. The election campaign has been described as a veritable odyssey. He crisscrossed two-thirds of the world in search of votes, visiting 86 countries, and he didn’t do it alone or without resources. He had the active support of the Brazilian civil-military state of the time, which saw this undertaking as an opportunity for the country’s international projection.

It was state power and personal ambition working together. This is a lesson in how to read the chessboard. While the competitors jostled for the obvious center, Havelange moved toward the unappreciated margins. He understood that in an election based on votes, the forgotten periphery is worth just as much as the celebrated center, and he built his victory vote after vote, handshake after handshake, in places no European would have bothered to go.

When election day arrived in Frankfurt, the British still hadn’t grasped what had happened. They underestimated the Brazilian until the last moment and lost. 68 votes to 52 for Stanley Rous. Havelange became the first non-European to hold the FIFA presidency and remains the only Brazilian to have held that post.

The victory shocked the international press, who couldn’t understand how the untouchable had been touched. But winning the election was only the beginning, because Havelange didn’t just want the office; he wanted to transform the institution. And it was here that he revealed the intuition worth its weight in gold, the idea that would change football forever.

He understood something no one before him had understood so clearly. The World Cup wasn’t just a tournament, it was a market, a global product with an audience of billions, capable of attracting sponsors, television contracts, and money on a scale football had never imagined. When Havelange took over, FIFA was a modest organization, with a handful of employees, operating with an almost artisanal mentality.

Under his leadership, this would change completely. The first major move was expansion. For decades, the World Cup had featured 16 teams. Havelange expanded it to 24 teams starting with the 1982 World Cup. It would later reach 32 teams. And this expansion wasn’t just sporting; it was profoundly strategic.

Think about who profited from the most seats. The very Third World countries that had elected him. More seats meant more teams from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East arriving at the world’s greatest sporting festival. Havelange was paying the political price for his election, while simultaneously expanding the market.

Each new team brought with it a whole new nation of fans, viewers, and consumers. More countries at the Cup meant a larger global audience, and more viewers meant more money. It was commercial brilliance disguised as sporting generosity.

He democratized access to the tournament and, by doing so, multiplied the value of the product. The two objectives went hand in hand: political and financial, loyalty to allies and the expansion of the empire. Beyond the main Cup, Havelange created new tournaments, opening up even more avenues for revenue and influence. He professionalized the entity, transforming FIFA, which had been a small organization, into a global brand, a machine.

Sponsors arrived, television contracts multiplied, money began to flow on an unprecedented scale. Here was the complete transformation. The entity that Robert Guérin had founded in a modest, amateurish room in Paris became a billion-dollar business under Havelange. The second foundation, the real one in terms of power and money, occurred not in 1904, but in the decades after 1974, at the hands of a Brazilian who saw a market where others saw only a game. But every empire has a cost. And

The cost of Havelange’s empire was being built alongside his greatness, within the very structures that made him powerful. Because at the same time as he modernized FIFA, Havelange was creating something darker. He established a culture of favors and privileges for top executives. A system in which power was maintained through benefits, bought loyalty, and a web of intertwined interests.

It was this culture that laid the foundation for the next reign, the reign of his successor, Sepp Blatter, which would remain deeply tainted by corruption. The same political acumen that had brought him to power, the same ability to forge alliances and distribute advantages, had a dark side.

Building loyalty through favors works until the day the favors become corruption. And the line between one thing and another in the empire Havelange built was becoming increasingly invisible. For years, this remained in the shadows. FIFA grew. The World Cup became the biggest sporting event on the planet, and Havelange was celebrated as the man who modernized football.

But time, that implacable judge, would eventually bring to light what was hidden in the coffers. The central scandal has a name: ISL. It was a sports marketing company that held invaluable television and marketing contracts with FIFA. And it was through it that Havelange’s personal money, the only personal money of his that would remain documented in the archives, appeared not as profit, not as an honestly built fortune, but as a bribe.

Swiss judicial documents showed that Havelange received at least 1,500,000 Swiss francs, the equivalent of approximately 986,000 pounds. And executive committee member Ricardo Teixeira, who was also his former son-in-law, received at least 12,740,000 Swiss francs, approximately 8,400,000 pounds. All this from the ISL company. In exchange for what? In exchange for the television and marketing contracts that kept the machine running.

The way the case was handled reveals the system from within. The executives returned 5.5 million Swiss francs, approximately 3.6 million pounds, to close the investigation. And on one condition: that their identities remain secret. The deal was meant to bury names, to pay for the truth to remain untold, but the truth found its way.

The case came to light thanks to an investigation by the BBC’s Panorama program, conducted by journalist Andrew Jennings in November 2010. It was investigative journalism that broke the pact of silence that money had bought. The consequences came, albeit belatedly. Havelange was forced to resign from the International Olympic Committee in 2011, and in 2013 he also resigned from the honorary presidency of FIFA.

But note the detail that makes this story so uncomfortable. He escaped any sporting punishment. He resigned, yes, but he was never actually punished by the sport to which he had dedicated himself and from which he had drawn so much. And the system he had helped create didn’t die with his departure. It exploded in even more spectacular fashion.

On May 27, 2015, the world witnessed a scene that read like a movie script. The U.S. Department of Justice released a monumental criminal complaint. 47 charges, 164 pages, seven FIFA officials accused of receiving $150 million in bribes over more than two decades.

And then came the image that has gone down in history. Swiss police entering the Baur au Lac luxury hotel in Zurich and arresting its executives. One of Europe’s most sophisticated addresses transformed into the scene of a police operation. In all, 14 people were under investigation. The FBI had reached the heart of world football. Sepp Blatter, Havelange’s successor, was not arrested, but the net tightened around him.

A few days after winning reelection for a fifth term, he resigned. The pressure was overwhelming. Sponsors like Coca-Cola and Visa, the brands that financially supported the empire, demanded changes. When the money that fuels the machine begins to withdraw, not even the most powerful man can resist.

And the scandals continued to unfold. In 2021, after a six-year investigation, Swiss prosecutors charged Sepp Blatter and Michel Platini with fraud and other crimes related to a controversial $2 million payment. Prior to that, FIFA’s own ethics committee had already suspended both of them for six years.

The two have always denied any wrongdoing, but the shadow of scandal was now structural. It wasn’t an isolated case; it was the way an institution operated. And there’s still an older, more disturbing shadow in Havelange’s career, a shadow that stems from Rio de Janeiro, the connection to the game of bicho, the traditional illegal Brazilian lottery controlled by figures known as bicheiros.

In 1994, Rio de Janeiro’s Attorney General, Antônio Carlos Biscaia, made a blunt statement: he said that João Havelange, who had been president of FIFA for years, received money from the game of bicho. And reports documented disturbing details. Bicheiro Castor de Andrade, one of Rio’s most notorious organized crime figures, kept a letter signed by Havelange in his safe, a letter attesting to the bicheiro’s good conduct and religious fervor.

And there’s a record of Havelange visiting Castor de Andrade in prison in 1997. Think about the symbolism. The man who ruled world football, who sat with heads of state, who was revered in stadiums around the world, attested in writing to the good nature of an illegal gambling kingpin, the two extremes of the same life: international splendor and murky roots.

And he moved between the two with equal ease. And what’s left of all this? What’s left of the empire this man built? Today, FIFA is one of the most powerful and wealthy organizations on the planet. For the 2023 to 2026 cycle, revenue is projected at $13 billion, exactly double the $6.5 billion of the previous cycle.

This figure was announced at the 75th FIFA Congress, held in Asunción, Paraguay, in May 2025. According to the Inside World Football portal, the financial reserves are impressive. At the end of 2024, FIFA had reserves and liquidity of $4.76 billion, according to Inside World Football. It’s worth noting, in fairness, that another accounting reading from The Sports Examiner portal indicates reserves of $2.948 billion at the end of 2024. The difference lies in the very definition of what is considered reserves. But in each of the accounts, we’re talking billions. The entity currently comprises 211 national associations, more associations than there are member countries of the United Nations. It employs more than 700 people.

Its global headquarters are in Zurich, Switzerland, and it maintains continental offices around the world. Rabat for Africa, Paris for Europe, Jakarta for Asia, and Miami for the Americas. An administrative empire with truly global reach. And it is here that we must ask the honest question: whose empire does this empire belong to? The answer reveals the unique nature of this story.

FIFA is a non-profit entity. It has no owner, no shareholders, and no founder who enriched himself from it in the traditional corporate sense. There is no verifiable public estimate of Havelange’s personal fortune as an owner, because he owned nothing. The empire didn’t have a master, it had controllers.

And this is the most brutal contradiction of the entire trajectory. Havelange transformed a modest entity into a business that today moves $13 billion per cycle. He built one of the most valuable and recognized brands in the world. And yet, the only personal money of his that remained documented in the archives was not profits.

It wasn’t a legitimately constructed fortune. It was bribes proven by Swiss justice. This is the record that survived. Not the builder’s assets, but the beneficiary’s illegal payments. João Havelange died on August 16, 2016, at the age of 100. He lived a full century.

He lived through world wars, regimes, and complete transformations in the worlds of sport and economics, and died without ever having been punished in sport. He resigned from his positions, yes, under pressure, but he left the scene without the sport to which he belonged ever definitively condemning him. His legacy, therefore, is impossible to simplify.

And therein lies the richness of this story. He can’t be defined as a pure hero, because the scandals are documented, proven, real. He can’t be defined as an absolute villain, because the transformation he brought about is undeniable. He took an artisanal entity and made it global. He gave Africa, Asia, and the Middle East a place in the greatest celebration of world sport.

He saw football as a market, when everyone else saw it as just a game. And these achievements cannot be erased. But he also built the machine of favors that devoured the institution itself from within. The culture he created to maintain his power became the culture that produced the arrests in Zurich, the FBI indictments, the global shame of 2015; the same talent that built the empire planted the seeds of its corrosion.

And this isn’t an isolated character flaw, it’s a pattern. It’s the hardest lesson of this story: that Havelange is the perfect case study of how true power is built, how to read the global chessboard before your competitors, how to transform what seems irrelevant—those forgotten Third World votes—into the foundation of an empire.

He learned to lead in a bus company and applied that lesson to the greatest sporting entity on the planet. He wasn’t afraid of being underestimated. He used his opponents’ arrogance against them. But he also shows where the invisible line lies. The line between building a legacy and building a machine that devours itself, between winning loyalty and buying silence, between transformative vision and corrupting ambition.

And the most disturbing thing is that in its trajectory, these things weren’t opposites. They were the same thing seen from different angles, the same skill, the same man. Return to that room in Frankfurt on June 11, 1974. The Brazilian who crossed two-thirds of the planet to defeat the man the English deemed untouchable.

At that moment, he was merely an unlikely winner, an heir who had proven his ability to command, a strategist who had seen the entire map. No one in that room imagined the empire that was to come, and no one imagined the price hidden in the coffers. Seventy years earlier, a 28-year-old French journalist had founded the entity in a room in Paris and disappeared from history without building anything resembling power.

Havelange did the opposite: he built everything, and in building it all, he also built the shadow that would accompany him until his death at 100, unpunished. The empire he built still stands, generating billions, governing the world’s most beloved sport, and the legacy of everything he touched has yet to be fully revealed.

The question this story raises remains. When someone builds something grandiose using the same methods that end up corrupting it, what remains in the end? The monument or the stain? And is it ever possible, in the case of empires built on power, to separate one from the other? If this story has made you think, let it play in your head, help Dossiê Impérios grow.

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Here at Dossiê Impérios, we tell stories in their entirety, with both light and shadow, because that’s the only way they make sense. See you in the next dossier.