Romario wants prison for football chiefs

BRASILIA: Brazil football legend Romario, now a lawmaker, said on Wednesday that the sport’s chiefs should serve prison time for the national team’s humiliating 7-1 World Cup defeat to Germany.

One day after the semi-final thrashing, Romario said the Brazilian Football Confederation (CBF) was plagued by corruption.

“Our football has been deteriorating for years,” said Romario in a letter posted in social media. “It is being dragged down by leaders who don’t even have the talent to juggle the ball.

“They stay in their luxury box seats, enjoying the millions that go into their accounts.”

The prolific striker said players and coaches were not to blame for the sport’s deterioration.

He said CBF president Jose Maria Marin and his deputy Marco Polo del Nero, who will take over in 2015, ‘should be in prison’.

Romario, a critic of the record $11 billion spent on the tournament, bemoaned the fact that President Dilma Rousseff will have to hand the World Cup trophy to a team other than Brazil in Sunday’s final.

“They will leave with the Cup and we will be left with our overbilled stadiums and no material legacy,” he said. “This will be the Cup of shame.”

Meanwhile, the agent of star striker Neymar, Wagner Ribeiro, set out a six-point list of “technical requirements” for the coach that made barbed references to Scolari, without specifically mentioning him.

The boss should have “trained Portugal and won nothing”, he said in the Twitter statement.

He should go to Chelsea and be ‘sacked’, coach in Uzbekistan then return to Brazil ‘and take a good team into the second division’.

The coach should be “arrogant and ridiculous,” he added.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 11^th, 2014.

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