Football's Secret Trade

Chapter 7The Switzerland of South America

By the time of the 2008 financial crisis, Juan Figer was in his mid-70s and winding down his career. By his own reckoning the first FIFA-authorized agent in Brazil had brokered more than 1,000 transfers in the four decades since he arrived from Uruguay as a young man. Dozens of the trades had been routed through his native country for the benefit of the shareholders of Panama-based Laminco Corporation International. The procedure had survived a parliamentary inquiry in his adopted home and was still operational, although on a smaller scale.

It was time for Figer to relax a little and reacquaint himself with his homeland, which he had left all those years ago. Now he would spend the summer months in the Uruguayan beach resort of Punta del Este while his sons Marcel and André oversaw business back in landlocked São Paulo. “I got used to the city but I miss the sea, now more than ever,” he told Brazilian newspaper O Globo. “I was born in Montevideo, near the water.”

But, while the transfer market veteran did not have the energy to jet around the world anymore and had closed his offices in Madrid and Tokyo, he could still pull off a big deal thanks to his contacts, including his old friend Jorge Nuno Pinto da Costa, who was also into his eighth decade.

Figer had known the FC Porto president for the best part of three decades. Their relationship dated back to 1986 when the agent represented Walter Casagrande, a 6-foot-3 striker who played ...