THE GREATEST SOCCER PLAYER WHO NEVER WAS
How to Become a Professional Athlete When You Aren’t Very Good
Carlos Henrique Raposo, who went by “Carlos Kaiser,” was born on April 2, 1963, one day after April Fools’ Day. It’s too bad, too, because he was a master at playing other people for fools.
A resident of Brazil, Kaiser was born a soccer fan, and like many of his classmates, he played youth soccer as both an adolescent and as a teen. Unlike most of his friends, though, Kaiser’s playing caught the eye of a professional club team. In 1979—when he was just sixteen years old—he became the newest member of Puebla. Unfortunately, things didn’t work out: Puebla released him before he ever played a game. While he was an athletic young man, he wasn’t a very good soccer player.
Undeterred, Kaiser decided to try a different career path: a con artist who hid his pedestrian ability by never actually playing in a game. At the time, marginal soccer players could find limited work on short-term contracts that lasted for weeks or months. Kaiser quickly discovered that whatever coaches thought a fill-in soccer player should look like, he looked the part. Some of his professional soccer player friends would even attest to his physical abilities, simply leaving out the part about his lack of soccer skills, which gave him a leg up on the competition. One team after another would sign Kaiser to a short contract.
A guaranteed paycheck in hand, he would then put his plan into action. He’d say he needed a month or so to get back into peak physical shape. Then, he would join the team for practices—and fall shortly after he got onto the pitch, claiming to have pulled a hamstring (and if that didn’t work, he had a dentist at the ready to lie about an infection). Without modern techniques available to diagnose the injury, the team would simply keep Kaiser on the bench until his contract ran out.
But that’s not what the local press would report. Kaiser took advantage of his access to free team gear, using it to bribe local reporters to write fawning reviews of his soccer prowess. So when Kaiser finally “healed” and was in search of a new team, it was easier to get another contract. From 1979 and into the 1990s, he signed contracts with as many as ten different soccer teams. And he never played in a single game!
There was one close call, however. In the late 1980s, Kaiser signed with the Brazilian team, Bangu. At the time, one of its owners was a man named Castor de Andrade. Castor was a big fan of Kaiser (or the legend of Kaiser, at least) and was getting increasingly frustrated that he wasn’t playing. So he forced the issue. Early during one match, with Bangu down 2-0, Castor sent a message to the coach that Kaiser was to be put into the game. Kaiser acted quickly. He spotted an opposing fan in the stands who was heckling the team and, as reported by The Guardian, “used it as an excuse to start a brawl with the away supporters.” The referees immediately threw Kaiser out of the game—before he had even gotten onto the pitch.
Yet he wasn’t thrown off the team for his errant behavior. He told Castor that the fan had accused Castor of being a thief—Kaiser was just defending his honor! Castor, still enamored with the soccer star, not only forgave him but also gave him a six-month contract extension.