CURITIBA, Brazil – In many ways, there is nothing extraordinary about Renan Lodi. A defender at Spanish football club Atlético Madrid, Lodi is among the hundreds of Brazilian players who have crossed the Atlantic to play for European clubs in elite leagues such as the Champions League.
More than 50 Brazilians, in fact, have played in the final. Lodi, 22, hopes to join this group later this month, when Atlético Madrid and seven other top teams gather in Portugal for the pandemic delay completion of this year’s tournament.
But while Lodi is still three victories away from lifting the trophy, his European odyssey has already proven profitable for the company that discovered him at an out-of-the-way football school when he was 13 years old. It has also validated an interesting business project built around early investments in a costly, and folop, Brazilian export: football talent.
Since the 1970s, the Stival family has run a successful food supply business, one of the largest of its kind in southern Brazil, from the southern city of Curitiba. About 15 years ago, the family turned their attention to football. Like millions of Brazilian families, the Stivals are avid fans of the game. But they could not help but notice how footballers became more and more goods, bought and sold for millions of dollars, just like the tons of beans, rice and cereals that the Stivals trade every week.
If players had become Commodities, the Stivals reasoned, they could probably find a way to trade money with them as well.
“The idea was to invest in this company because Brazil always makes money in this company,” Rafael Stival said in an interview last year, four months before Lodi became a member of the exodus of more than 300 footballers who Brazil traded for overseas leagues in 2019.
Sitting in his office at Trieste Futebol Clube – the amateur team in Curitiba that serves as a base for his football interests – Stival, a burly man with dark hair and a rich baritone voice, described how after early hiccups and countless mistakes he had made a way to trade from Brazil for the youngest talents, provide them briefly at Trieste and get them signed at the earliest opportunity by the country’s elite professional clubs.
For Stival, who runs the family’s football operation, investing in young players is a long-term bet, a process he compares to planting seeds that will one day grow in fruit-bearing trees. And Lodi is his biggest success to date.
Detected in 2012 by one of Stival’s scouts at a football school in the interior of the state of São Paulo (population: 44 million), Lodi, then 13, was invited to travel to Curitiba for closer inspection. He performed well enough to be signed to Stival’s amateur program before moving to Athletico Paranaense’s training center after his 14th birthday.
Last summer, at 21, he made the move to Europe, in a deal that was notable for its size (16 million euros, or just over $ 18.8 million), but also for its destination, Atlético Madrid, one of the best clubs on the continent.
In an interview from Spain in August, Lodi said that he remembered the early days in Trieste well: the loneliness, the fear, the nocturnal conversations with his father that he would beg to come home.
But he also remembered how he ate better at Trieste and, later, Paranese than he had ever had at home, and also how his football leagues were always about more than a professional career. His feet would determine the future for an entire family plunged into poverty, something even a 13-year-old could comprehend.
‘I’ve always had that goal in mind, you know? he said after a recent training session. ‘I said to myself,’ I’m going to be the father of the family. I will pursue my dreams, and I will try to give them a better state in the future. ‘ ”
Last year’s transfer fulfilled that dream, but it also finally produced a big payday for Stival, who received a 30 percent cut (about 4.8 million euros, or about $ 5.6 million) of the transfer fee.
Payments like that are the key to Stival’s football’s ambitions, and the reason he’s signing dozens of young players and then moving them quickly to one of the bigger clubs he’s had development agreements with: the more seeds he plants, the better his chances of seeing one bear fruit.
Lodi’s transfer to Madrid represented only the second transaction of a player discovered by the Stival operation since it began in 2005. But in that one deal, Rafael Stival said, the family took back more than half of their total investment.
In an interview earlier this summer, Stival said he expected the sales rate to grow now that dozens of his recruits had the football key chain up. More than 100 players who were once on the books of Trieste are now registered with professional teams, with most at Athletico Paranaense as the Rio de Janeiro giant Flamengo. Both clubs have partnership agreements that gave them the first right of refusal to players from Trieste.
Stival has a separate agreement with Trieste, a successful amateur team founded by Italian immigrants in 1937. In return for investing a huge sum in its facilities, his family has the right to use the club for 20 years as a basis for his football business, a contract that expires in 2025. With this investment, Stival can also get a reduction in transfer costs, because, under international transfer schemes, only teams can benefit from game sales.
Yet there has been a learning curve. Stival’s initial business plan focused on older boys, those who just needed a little extra focus to get them ready for professional contracts. It did not take long for Stival to realize the biggest mistake of the plan. ‘They will get lost at night,’ he said, taking a deep breath. “A total mess. We had to learn. ”
His renewed plan – his focus shifting from 18- and 19-year-olds to boys as young as 11 or 12 – would require more patience.
“When we entered, we thought we would make money within two years,” Stival said. “Now it’s been 14 years and we have not recovered our expenses yet.”
Stival sat under seven large maps of Brazilian states, and explained how the players are discovered. About half a dozen scouts – including Stival – go on month-long missions deep into the interior of Brazil, watching hundreds of players at a time. Tips on local children come from a network of local coaches, schoolmasters and others, a vine that has led Stival to some of the most remote parts of the country, including, on at least one occasion, a country reserve.
The best players are invited to Trieste for a trial that can last up to two weeks. Local laws and age restrictions intended to prevent child trafficking mean that the majority of players cannot stay on the club’s campus, so families have to make difficult decisions immediately. Some move hundreds, or even thousands of miles to guide a child, lured by the hope of life-changing opportunities that can follow if the trial is a success. But the plan, at least on Stival’s part, is always for a short stay.
“Our idea is to discover talent,” Stival said. “We do not want to keep a player from 10 to 20. We want to bring him into a club and move on. A child who is 10, 11, 12, 13 – who has conditions to live nearby – we will take.
“It’s very fast here: Every day they spend with us is a cost to us.”
For five years, Trieste had an exclusive agreement with Athletico Paranaense, one of two top professional teams in Curitiba, a city of 1.8 million. More than 60 players, including Lodi, were relocated by Trieste to the Athletico facilities, now among the best in Brazil, before the contract was abruptly terminated in 2018. Athletico Paranaense, its president said in a WhatsApp message, had just decided the most of its own scouting and youth development.
Stival’s disappointment was short-lived. Less than 24 hours later, he said, Flamengo officials arrived at his office to discuss terms. A deal was signed, and now the best prospects are flowing from Trieste to Rio instead.
Last year, however, disaster struck. A fire broke out through a temporary bedroom at Flamengo’s training institute, which housed a gang of young hopefuls, in which 10 were killed, including three boys who came through Trieste. The dead brought an early focus on how Brazil, the world’s largest exporter of football talent, cares for the thousands of boys and young men who enter the foot pipeline in hopes of overcoming the opportunity.
Disturbing examples soon arose at other clubs – confirmed bedrooms, dangerous conditions, poor supervision – and the authorities shut down the worst offenders and promised more supervision.
In Trieste, however, something strange happened. Hopeful parents, now aware of the club’s link to Flamengo’s youth academy, began to make contact. Could the club, they asked, run the boss over their sons as well?
Stival could only shake his head at the time. A year later, with Lodi’s banking income, Triaste expanded its operations. Flamengo has recruited more than 30 of Stival’s players into their youth ranks in the last 18 months, and those who can not find a place there have been sent elsewhere. His investments, he hopes, may kick off yet another big payday.
On a late afternoon, Stival turned on his television and came on a broadcast from Atlético Madrid playing a Spanish league match. Lodi, now a rising star, worked up and down the left flank and lived the dream of countless Brazilian teenagers. For the Stival family, he represented something else: proof of concept – a successful business plan in the form of a revamped left-back.
If Lodi and Atlético make a deep run in the Champions League this month, Stival could see another return on his investment. As part of the sale of Lodi last year, Athletico Paranaense negotiated a bonus payment of 3 million euros (about $ 3.5 million) based on his performances in Spain.
Manuela Andreoni contributed report from Rio de Janeiro.
