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In the middle of 1989, suburban soccer dad Chuck Blazer had just lost his job, had no income, and was struggling with debt.
But he did have a few things going for him: He was audacious, with a keen eye for opportunity; he was a splendid salesman; and he knew a vast amount about the world’s most popular sport. Not the fine points of on-field strategy — he’d never actually played the game — but rather the business of American soccer, which was, back then, woeful. Compared to baseball, basketball, and football, soccer was a starving runt. Multiple professional leagues had flopped. TV networks couldn’t even figure out how to fit commercials into the 90-minute, time-out-free games, and they rarely bothered to broadcast the sport. The United States national team hadn’t qualified for a World Cup in nearly 40 years.
A quarter-century later, American soccer has become an athletic and economic powerhouse, due substantially to the contributions of Blazer. He helped win Major League Soccer’s first real TV contract, and just last month the MLS inked a $720 million TV deal. The U.S. national team, which he helped promote, is now a World Cup mainstay, ranked higher than powers such as France and the Netherlands. And more people in America are playing soccer than any team sport save basketball.
Blazer’s influence wasn’t limited to these shores: He helped organize the Gold Cup, the Confederations Cup, and the Club World Cup, lucrative tournaments that improved the play of national and professional teams around the world. He also became the first American in almost half a century on the executive committee of FIFA, instilling a business-first culture in world soccer’s governing body and persuading it to take control of its own television rights, turning the money-losing organization into a profit machine.
And Blazer? He has raked in more than $21 million from the sport, much of it paid to offshore shell companies. He flew around the world in the first-class cabin, lived in an $18,000-a-month apartment high above the glitziest stretch of New York’s Fifth Avenue, and relaxed in a luxury condo in the Bahamas — on soccer’s dime. With a huge unruly mass of bushy hair and beard, and a broad toothy grin over a prodigious belly, he palled around with the globe’s glamorous and powerful, including Vladimir Putin, Hillary Clinton, Pope John Paul II, and Nelson Mandela.
Much of Blazer’s wealth and influence can be traced back to an extraordinary contract he made with the organization that runs soccer from Panama to Canada, the Confederation of North, Central American and Caribbean Association Football, or CONCACAF. It entitled him to 10% — under his unilateral interpretation — of just about every penny the organization brought in. That document provided him an intoxicating personal incentive to grow the sport, earning him a life of spectacular luxury and an unforgettable nickname: Mr. Ten Percent.
International soccer has a notorious reputation for corruption and intrigue, one that contrasts sharply with its squeaky-clean image in America. For millions here, the sport represents an antidote to the cynical, alienating gloss of the NFL, NBA, and MLB. Don’t buy it. American soccer came of age under the watchful eye of a man who is half soccer dad, half globe-trotting rogue, who ultimately would be called a swindler by the very organization that he led for 21 years.
Blazer’s version of the Horatio Alger story would end with his downfall, as the powerful men who aided his rise eventually turned against him — and he them — exposing his secrets and laying bare his voracious self-interest. He would, finally, be stripped of his rank and cast down from the soccer firmament.
Several people with knowledge of CONCACAF operations said they had met with law enforcement agents to discuss Blazer’s activities or to pass along documents to aid an ongoing investigation into possible fraud, money laundering, and tax evasion. The Federal Bureau of Investigation declined comment, and the Internal Revenue Service said it could not confirm or deny the existence of an investigation. Blazer has not been charged with wrongdoing.
CONCACAF, for its part, concluded a lengthy probe of Blazer last year, finding that he committed fraud against the confederation, misappropriated its funds while breaching fiduciary responsibility, violated the FIFA ethics code, and broke U.S. tax laws. Last year FIFA said it was suspending its own investigation into Blazer’s activities.
Blazer, 69 years old, declined multiple requests for interviews, citing recent surgery, and he did not respond to a detailed letter delivered to his residence last week seeking comment. The information in this article was taken from interviews with more than three dozen people involved in soccer or other aspects of Blazer’s life, as well as public documents, court records, commissioned investigations, news clippings, manuscripts, histories, biographies, and monographs about the sport. Full source notes can be found here. While pieces of Blazer’s story and his dramatic departure from soccer have previously been covered, this article offers the fullest account of his entire career.
“I’m perfectly satisfied that I did an excellent job,” Blazer said in one of his few recent public statements. “I spent 21 years building the confederation and its competitions and its revenues and I’m the one responsible for its good levels of income.” Indeed, Blazer has maintained repeatedly he was entitled to everything he got under the terms of his contract, and that CONCACAF still owes him millions of dollars.
Many people who helped develop soccer in the U.S. have praised Blazer’s commitment, hard work, and, especially, vision for the sport. “Chuck is one of the most important people in the history of soccer in this country,” MLS Commissioner Don Garber has said. “Not every American knows that the man behind the scenes pushing this sport is Chuck.”
Next week, the 2014 World Cup opens in São Paulo, and the U.S. national team will be there, competing in its seventh consecutive World Cup. Chuck Blazer, the feared and revered godfather of modern American soccer, infirm and exiled from the sport, is not expected to attend. But as billions of people around the world tune into the world’s most watched sporting event, his greatest legacy might be that more of those viewers than ever will be American.
Perhaps it took a man like Chuck Blazer to help yank U.S. soccer out of its dark ages. Maybe only someone as canny, ambitious, and ruthlessly self-serving as he could successfully navigate the ugly side of the beautiful game.
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International soccer’s most lurid scandals typically involve match fixing, as happened recently in Italy and China, or blatant bribery. But ironically, the most abused loophole of the sport’s international governance may be its radical commitment to democracy. In FIFA, and in each of the six regional confederations that govern the sport, every member nation is granted exactly one vote.
The tiny island of Montserrat, population scarcely 5,000, has the same voting power as China, population 1.3 billion. This means that CONMEBOL, the 10-nation South American body that oversees soccer powers Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay, with nine World Cup titles among them, is the planet’s weakest confederation. The Confederation of African Football, with 54 members, none of which have ever advanced beyond the quarterfinals, is as strong as the organization representing Europe and part of Central Asia.
It doesn’t take much imagination to realize that this setup creates the potential for manipulation, particularly when dealing with small, poor countries with virtually zero stake in the integrity of the sport because their teams have almost no hope of ever playing in soccer’s most important events.
Soccer from Panama City to the Arctic Circle, including the U.S., is overseen by CONCACAF. For decades, the confederation had been controlled by Mexico and Central American countries, largely because they were the only ones with enough interest in soccer to care about influencing the sport. Nevertheless, CONCACAF’s numerous island states dwarfed the mainland nations in number of votes. He who could build a coalition of palm trees and white sand beaches could make CONCACAF his own.
That simple fact brought the unemployed Blazer in November 1989 to Port of Spain, where the U.S. national team was playing Trinidad and Tobago for a final shot at qualifying for the World Cup the following year.
Chuck Blazer with Jack Warner in 2008.
AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee
A large American contingent was there to root for the red, white, and blue — which won the game and finally made the World Cup thanks to a legendary Paul Caliguiri goal known as the Shot Heard Round the World. But Blazer wasn’t just there to cheer; he came to strategize with his pal Jack Warner on how they might conquer CONCACAF.The two first met in 1984 when both served at CONCACAF, Warner representing his native Trinidad and Blazer the U.S. They became fast friends while attending the 1986 World Cup in Mexico together; Blazer, whose garrulous enthusiasm and love of costume parties contrasted with the acerbic reserve of Warner, would come to call the diminutive former schoolteacher his “best friend.”
The day after the Trinidad–U.S. match, Blazer consoled Warner on his team’s loss. Then he urged him to run for CONCACAF president.
Blazer ran Warner’s campaign, and the pair quickly locked up the entire Caribbean bloc. When the 1990 election took place that April, Warner won with three times as many votes as the incumbent, an elderly Mexican with diabetes. Warner immediately appointed Blazer general secretary, charged with running the confederation’s day-to-day operations.
Unlike his predecessors, who focused on organizing rinky-dink tournaments in Tegucigalpa or San Salvador, Blazer realized that soccer’s commercial potential lay in the United States, the sport’s great, untapped market. He moved CONCACAF’s headquarters from Guatemala City to the Big Apple, and on July 31, 1990, he signed the contract that would guide the rest of his career.
Technically, the contract was not with Blazer himself, but with a seven-month-old New York company that he founded and controlled with the unlikely name of Sportvertising. Under the terms of the eight-page retainer agreement, Sportvertising would provide CONCACAF with an employee who would carry out the duties of the general secretary. In exchange, CONCACAF would provide office space and administrative support and pay Sportvertising a series of fees plus a 10% cut of certain types of revenue, including “sponsorships and TV rights fees.” At the time, CONCACAF had virtually no TV deals and brought in scarcely $140,000 a year.
Warner, who called Blazer “one of the top international businessmen” in the U.S., signed on behalf of CONCACAF.
An employment lawyer who reviewed the contract for BuzzFeed called it “unreal,” noting that in addition to the 10% share of TV sponsorship and rights deals, it gave Blazer 10% of the cash value of barter and in-kind deals, a fixed monthly “administrative fee,” and an additional 10% cut of the administrative and TV sponsorship fees — in essence, a fee on fees. It also provided an unspecified amount for benefits such as vacation pay, a per diem in addition to reimbursement for travel expenses, and two life insurance policies with Blazer’s estate as beneficiaries.
At first, his cut amounted to 10% of almost nothing. Warner, in remarks last year, recalled that Blazer’s wife initially paid CONCACAF’s rent in the Trump Tower, where the confederation set up offices. But the document’s language gave Blazer a very personal incentive to transform CONCACAF into a cash cow.
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Forest Hills High School
Blazer didn’t come from money. Classmates said he grew up working behind the counter at his family’s stationery store and newsstand, Blazer’s, in Rego Park, a heavily Jewish middle-class neighborhood in Queens. But he went to Forest Hills High School, one of those legendary New York brain factories that pumps out generation after generation of talent.Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel were Forest Hills grads, as were the Ramones, and U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew. The FHHS class of 1961 included Jerry Springer, the TV host and former Cincinnati mayor.
Charles Gordon Blazer also graduated in 1961. Surprisingly, given the Falstaffian figure he would become, few classmates remember much about him. Al Kooper, who founded Blood, Sweat & Tears and played with Bob Dylan, didn’t go to Forest Hills but remembered being in a band one summer with Blazer, who played tenor sax. “When autumn came, Chuck blazed out,” said Kooper, who never saw him again.
Forest Hills had a soccer team, but Blazer wasn’t on it. Nor was he on the yearbook staff or the math team. In fact, his only listed activity was the Marshal Squad, whose members were “the guys who sat in the hallway and asked you for your hall pass,” one classmate recalled. “The jerks.”
As an undergraduate at New York University, Blazer studied accounting and married his high school sweetheart, Susan Aufox. He then enrolled in NYU’s Stern School of Business. University records show he never finished his MBA, but he didn’t need it.
His first big business success came around 1970, when two brothers from Philadelphia helped create a national craze for the world’s original emoticon, the yellow smiley face, by adding the phrase “Have a Happy Day.”
Blazer ran a button factory in Queens owned by his father-in-law, and he became one of the country’s principal manufacturers of the iconic buttons. “We bought millions of buttons from Chuck,” said Bernard Spain, who, along with his brother, went on to create the Dollar Express chain. The public’s appetite for the buttons was insatiable, yet Spain was frustrated by a perennially short supply.
“We kept asking him for more, and he didn’t have them, because he was selling buttons” to competitors, recalled Spain, who said he ultimately ended the relationship. “Chuck was a charming guy. But everybody is nice until they screw you.”
The smiley face fad ended almost overnight, and Blazer turned to selling other promotional and marketing items, such as ashtrays and monogrammed beach towels — anything to turn a buck.
“Chuck was a wonderful talent,” said Marvin Lieberman, a friend and business associate who until 2007 owned a company that made inflatables such as the giant ketchup bottles and beer cans displayed in supermarket aisles. “He could look at his checkbook and not have a penny in the bank, go to work, and in three weeks he’d have made $200,000 or $300,000.”
In 1976, Blazer’s son, Jason, started playing youth soccer in Westchester County, N.Y., where the family lived. It proved an auspicious moment: Scarcely 100,000 children were even playing the game in America, but right around that time, popular interest was picking up, in big part because the New York Cosmos had just paid Brazilian megastar Pelé millions of dollars to play in the North American Soccer League. Blazer began coaching his son’s team, with his flexible sales work giving him plenty of free time to get deeply involved in the sport.
Parents of other youth soccer players remember him as an adroit and active administrator, more interested in organizing game schedules, lining fields, or designing uniforms than actual coaching. Blazer soon moved up in the ranks of Youth Soccer of New Rochelle, N.Y., and then the Eastern New York State Soccer Association.
Perhaps the first time Blazer leveraged soccer to his financial advantage came in 1981, when the father of one of his son’s friends hired him for consulting work. Fred Singer had just opened a direct-mail marketing firm and realized the business would benefit from computerized sales data. Blazer, whom he met on the soccer sidelines and recognized as “a very good B.S. person” and “influence peddler,” was the only person he knew who owned a computer.
Once a week, Singer would come over, and the two would huddle over Blazer’s imposing IBM 5120 — a 100-pound behemoth that retailed for $13,500 — and punch in numbers. “He helped create almost every model of purchase order I ever used,” said Singer. “I still use Chuck’s orders to this day.”
In 1982, Blazer asked a favor. Some merchandise sales had fallen through, and he needed cash. Singer drew up the papers and transferred $27,332.40 to Blazer's company — about $67,000 in today’s dollars — payable in 90 days.
But Blazer paid back only a portion of the debt, and Singer sued, reaching a settlement years later. While the case was still pending, though, Blazer “came into the office and said he’d like another loan,” Singer recalled. “That’s the ultimate chutzpah. Who does that?”
Blazer (far right) with the US Youth Soccer National Select Team in July of 1983.
US Youth Soccer