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Ser Sporting não se implora, não se ensina, não se espera, somente se vive... ou não.
Judges, prosecutors and even Portugal’s prime minister count themselves as Benfica supporters. But what happens when those fans are allowed to preside over cases that affect the club’s interests?
The judge’s allegiance to Benfica, the biggest soccer club in Portugal, hardly made him an outlier.
Benfica quite often boasts that it can count more than half of Portugal’s population as supporters, and judges, prosecutors, top police officials and even the country’s prime minister are regular guests in the directors’ box at the team’s matches. One judge has been so loyal, in fact, that he was honored last year with a Golden Eagle lapel pin, symbolic of his half-century affiliation with the club.
So when it was revealed that a judge, not the one given the lapel pin but another one, had joined the legion of critics assailing a 31-year-old computer hacker, Rui Pinto, who had embarrassed Benfica by publishing some of its darkest secrets online, few rushed to his defense.
But to lawyers for Pinto, who is scheduled to stand trial this summer, the judge’s fandom was a serious problem: He had been assigned to oversee their client’s case.
“You don’t feel at ease,” Pinto’s Portuguese lawyer, Francisco Teixeira da Mota, said in a telephone interview. “Of course, we would like someone who is not committed to Benfica.”
Benfica’s reach, though, may make that extremely difficult. The Lisbon team is the biggest of Portugal’s three most powerful clubs, a sporting and media colossus whose influence extends into nearly every aspect of daily life in the country. It is a team whose victories are celebrated, whose losses are greatly mourned and whose fans hold positions of power in everything from media to banking to government. That power, Benfica’s critics say, affords the club and its leaders a type of leverage that extends far beyond the soccer field, and explains why some refer to it as the Octopus.
Ana Gomes, a known career diplomat turned anticorruption campaigner, stated in a recent interview that she believed Benfica’s outsize influence had given it a privileged status in Portuguese society, particularly when it came to legal matters. The phrase she used to describe that status — “state capture” — refers to the notion that private entities like corporations, or maybe even a popular sports team, can grow so powerful that they are able, if they choose, to unduly influence the state itself.
***Pode ler o resto do extenso artigo de Tariq Panja aqui.
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