Kaiser says he had some talent but chose not to use it. Long before Stephen Ireland came up with the idea, Kaiser was committing grannycide: his grandmother was regularly killed off to help him avoid his inanimate nemesis, the football. He paid youth-team members to clatter him in training so that he could fake injury, and gave watching spectators money to sing his name when the club owner was around. He would do anything to avoid playing or win favour. One team became so frustrated with Kaiser’s injuries that they called in a witch doctor Kaiser brusquely informed him there are some things even black magic cannot cure and sent him packing. In theory Kaiser was a centre-forward in practice he was a really false nine. Trouble was, that space was usually as far away from the action as possible. On the few occasions he did train, he had the rare ability to find himself in space. I think that’s why everybody liked him so much.” “He would tell stories and he would get players dreaming. “He created a fun, happy and lighthearted mood,” says Alexandre Torres, the former Brazil international and son of Carlos Alberto. In the first training session Kaiser usually suffered a muscle injury that would keep him out for an indefinite period, during which he would hang around the club and become an unofficial morale specialist.
Bebeto, the World Cup-winning striker of 1994, says: “His chat was so good that if you let him open his mouth, that would be it. “Life,” says Kaiser, “is marketing” – and he told his stories with such infectious conviction that it was easy to be swept along. Even if they had the inclination to check – and Rio has never been the most anal of places – they wouldn’t have been able to do so. In those days, before the internet, nobody was much the wiser. If he was in the mood, he would approach journalists, players and the club owner, constructing a web of lies so elaborate that nobody could remember who had vouched for him in the first place. His staple trick was to make friends with influential people: he would befriend powerful figures at each club, telling them about his impressive football CV. Kaiser had more front than Copacabana Beach. Photograph: Carlos Kaiser Piggy in the middle
One of the greatest players of all time poses with Zico. As you dig deeper, one thing becomes abundantly clear: a lot of this stuff really did happen. His memory is somewhere between selective and defective, and there is an undeniable element of fantasy to his story. It includes interviews with legends of Brazilian football such as Carlos Alberto, Zico, Júnior, Bebeto and Renato Gaúcho – not to mention multiple audiences with Kaiser. His story is so astonishing that, in 2015, a British company bought exclusive rights for a feature-length documentary. It’s everybody else’s problem if they want me to be a footballer. “I wanted to be among the other players,” Kaiser says. Yet throughout his career he went out of his way not to play football. He had a career spanning more than two decades, during which he was associated with Rio’s four biggest clubs – Flamengo, Fluminense, Botafogo and Vasco da Gama – as well as Bangu, América and a number of overseas teams. Renato Gaúcho, one of the finest Brazilian players of his generation, calls Kaiser “the greatest footballer never to have played football”.
Most of all, he was football’s finest conman. In his pomp he was everything from fixer to gigolo to party planner to gangster’s pet.
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A good Carioca is somebody who knows how to live life.” “ Cariocas (natives of Rio) are more free, relaxed, fun. “Rio de Janeiro is a special state,” says Joel Santana, the coach who has won the state championship (the Campeonato Carioca) with all four of Rio’s main clubs. And in one ostentatiously bemulleted package, he embodied the roguish charm of one of the world’s most soulful cities. Carlos Henrique Raposo was the handle his parents gave him but he never had much use for that.
It’s also Kaiser, in Rio de Janeiro, in the 1980s and 1990s.
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