1.1 The Rise and Fall of Bruno de Carvalho - The Rise to Power

What follows is the first in a series of long reads which will chart the rise and fall of the onetime club president of Sporting Clube de Portugal, Bruno de Carvalho. If you're not familiar with what happened during his presidency then hold onto your hats, it's going to be a wild ride. I'm going to take you on a journey that will culminate with one of the darkest days in the club's history and the subsequent legal cases that followed in its wake. 

For some of you reading this it will all be brand new, for others a refresher of what happened during his reign. Therefore a one size fits all approach will be hard to achieve so throughout I'll add additional context where I think it's deemed necessary, but if you read each part in turn it should ensure that even if you're coming to this blind you should quickly grab a sense of who everyone is. Of course what will follow will largely be based on fact but along the way opinions stated will be my own for which I don't ask you to agree with. If you wish to challenge any of those opinions you can do so anonymously in the comments section at the end of each post. It's a story all told that will be incredibly wide ranging and even if you think you know the entire story you might well be surprised at what was turned up. I'll put my hands up and immediately say that I had many memories in my head of the time that weren't correct at all. But enough from me for now, let's get on with it. 

We'll begin the story in the early 1970s. 

Bruno Miguel de Azevedo Gaspar de Carvalho was born in Mozambique in 1972. At the time the African country was still a Portuguese colony, only achieving independence in 1975 which coincided with his family moving to Lisboa home of Sporting Clube de Portugal at the age of 4 years old. This was the same year that his Great Uncle José Baptista Pinheiro de Azevedo became the 104th prime minister of Portugal, a position he held between September 19th, 1975 and June 23rd, 1976. You can just see a young Bruno on the playgrounds telling anyone who'd listen that his Great Uncle was the Prime Minister of Portugal and all the kids marking him out as a compulsive liar despite it actually being true in his case. I'm not sure kids at four call bullshit but let's assume there's a Portuguese equivalent of liar, liar, pants on fire. 

His grandfather was the writer Eduardo de Azevedo, who penned ‘A História e Vida do Sporting Clube de Portugal.’ It may have come as no surprise then to learn that with his family role models in positions of political power and with a passion for Sporting Clube de Portugal that the young Bruno would one day set his sights on making his mark within the SAD, culminating in his bid to one day become its president.

Clearly bright, he received both a degree in management and sports management and it's noted that in 2000 he attended a UEFA coaching course. Maybe that’s the reason why he felt qualified as the club president to take up his position on the matchday bench? I mean clearly it was his ego for sure but it's some form of an excuse I guess. From 2009 through 2011 he took up his first role with Sporting acting as vice-president of the roller hockey department and on March 11th, 2011 he stood for the presidency of the football team but would eventually lose the election to Godhino Lopes by a mere 360 votes. He contested the results of the vote with allegations of irregularities as well as requesting a recount of the votes. Sound like anyone familiar in relation to presidential elections and claims of rigged voting?

Lopes, full name Luís Filipe Fernandes David Godinho Lopes, like de Carvalho was also born in Mozambique. He came to Portugal in 1970 with his family at the age of 18 and graduated as a Civil Engineer. His association with Sporting began in February 1999 when he joined the Board of Directors as vice president in the area of heritage when the construction of the training complex at Alcochete and the new Estádio José Alvalade were in the design phase. He would go on to occupy the position of President of NEJA (new stadium José Alvalade, the e being for Estádio in Portuguese). His first stint with the club ended in 2003 owing to judicial issues relating to his professional life for which he would later be acquitted. His return followed with the aforementioned successful candidacy for president. It should be noted that the football clubs last league title win was already a decade past, coming in the 2001/02 season when they finished 5 points above the now defunct Boavista in second place.

Following his ascent to power Lopes hired Domingos Paciência as the new Sporting mister in the May of 2011. The lions had already been eliminated from the Taça da Liga by the time Paciência was replaced in February of 2012 after a defeat by Marítimo which left them sat in fifth place, 16 points off the top of the league. Step forward his successor - Ricardo Sá Pinto.

Sá Pinto was an ex-Sporting player who transferred to the club in 1994 and helped fire the lions to their first Taça de Portugal win in 13 seasons. He’ll be remembered for his one-year suspension for an assault on the National team coach Artur Jorge, an incident which would see him be transferred to Real Sociedad in Spain. He would however later return to the lions at the turn of the new century and would be part of the side who reached the UEFA Cup Final in 2005, played at the old José Alvalade only to lose to CSKA Moscow and eventually he became club captain. After retirement he returned to work for the club behind the scenes and in November 2009 became director of football. This lasted for just two months before he resigned following a punch up with striker Liedson after a 4-3 home win over Mafra in the Taça de Portugal. Things with Sporting around this time were certainly never dull. Sá Pinto however was like a boomerang and kept finding a way of coming back.

Despite his lack of coaching experience, Sá Pinto as the lions mister exceeded all expectations and took the lions to the semi-finals of UEFA Cup and his side finished 4th in the domestic table. Sporting would go on to lose the Taça de Portugal to lowly Académica. Despite this disappointing loss he was still in charge come the start of the new campaign which saw the lions win just twice in their opening 9 games. After a 3-0 defeat to the Hungarian side Videoton in October of 2012 he was given his marching orders.

Lopes then turned to the Belgian François Vercauteren who took up his role as the new mister with the lions on October 30th, 2012 with a short term contract to the end of the campaign. Vercauteren would be remembered for launching the careers of Eric Dier and Ricardo Esgaio but little else in a favourable light. To be honest when I say the words Esgaio and favourable light in the same sentence that's clearly also a stretch. Sorry Ricardo, you've still won more titles than Harry Kane my man don't let the bastards grind you down. I digress. By the time January came round the lions were only 1 point above the relegation places and so it would come as no surprise when the club dispensed with Vercauteren’s services on January 7th.

It was during this very same month that club members André Patrão and Miguel Paím published ‘Dar Rumo ao Sporting’ which formed the basis of the movement triggered during the 2012/13 crisis with the aim of convening an extraordinary General Assembly in order to dismiss the Board of Directors of Sporting Clube de Portugal.

Initially the Manifesto "Giving Direction to Sporting" was poorly received but it would eventually prove to be the catalyst for change at the top of the club. Certainly helped by the poor results on the field leading to dissatisfaction in the stands, the pair would eventually collect the 1,000 signatures required to call the General Assembly. In fact despite the initial scepticism they received, they would eventually gain some 3,200 signatures in total to support the proposed motion. The pair of Patrão and Paím were met by Lopes who had hoped to dissuade them from their initiative but he did so without success. In the January of 2013 they took their request to the board of the General Assembly. After two years of troubled management, Godinho Lopes resigned from his position on February 6th, 2013 owing to the serious institutional crisis that the club was going through, giving rise to a new electoral process, which was scheduled for March 23rd, 2013.

Several candidates emerged to challenge for the top spot, one of whom was de Carvalho making his second bid for the presidency. Carlos Severino, a retired journalist, was a candidate representing SOS Save Sporting. Businessman João Paiva dos Santos was also in the running but moved aside in favour of José Couceiro. The campaigning for each candidate lasted a month and the main focus for each was the perilous financial situations of both the club and the SAD.

Side bar - if you are not familiar with the workings of the club let me quickly take the time to explain and if you are au fait, then scroll onto the next paragraph. Sporting Clube de Portugal is as the name suggests - a sporting club. It's like Ronsil, it does exactly what it says on the tin. Internationally it's best known for the men's football team who are still known as the same name. You may also here them referred to as Sporting CP or Sporting. We've already mentioned the club's roller hockey team. Add to that aikido, archery, athletics, basketball, capoeira, equestrian, fishing, fencing, futsal, golf, gymnastics, handball, judo, karate, kickboxing, padel, rowing, rugby union, shooting, swimming, surfing, table tennis, taekwondo, tennis triathlon, volleyball and water polo. You can even throw chess and eSports into the mix and there's probably some that I have missed. It's a SAD which stands for Sociedade Anónima Desportiva which translates to Public Limited Sports Company. The same type of structure exists in Spain and basically, it's the equivalent of a fan owned club in the English leagues. At the top of the board sits the club president, whereas in English football you'd have the Chairman. There is a football club who has the word Lisbon (Lisboa in Portuguese) in their name, that of their rivals Sport Lisboa e Benfica. And now back with the post…

Learning from his mistakes in the previous election, de Carvalho would adopt a more cautious approach to this campaign which is interesting to note when compared to what happens in the years to come. The 2013 elections become the first in which members can vote by mail and in addition by means of electronic voting if you voted in person. As frequently happens with any change, the vote soon ran into complications and a three day extension was announced in which to solve the ongoing issues but even despite of these hiccups it was apparent, even in the early hours of March 24th, 2013 that Bruno de Carvalho was all set to become the new club president having already collected 53.6% of those votes counted. Poor old Severino had just 1% and Couceiro 45.3%. Clearly no one trusts journalists in Portugal either.

The final results were confirmed on March 26th. Of 32,518 members eligible to vote only 16,095 would exercise their right. 14,166 did so using the new electronic system. The Official final results were as follows:

Carlos Severino - 1.02%

Bruno de Carvalho - 53.69%

José Couceiro - 45.29%

And so began the Bruno de Carvalho era…

There's going to be a lot of reporting in the upcoming posts in the series about some very questionable behaviour on the part of the new club President. Full admission, both myself and de Carvalho share a period of very questionable behaviour associated with large football clubs. What happened under his tenure as club president had far reaching consequences. Thankfully I don't think my actions ever resulted in acts of physical violence, though I myself have certainly been on the receiving end of enough threats in my time. I did however cause a lot of well documented emotional and reputational damage. I fully believe that to grow you have to be accountable for your actions. I can't write about his story without first acknowledging the line of devils that once lived on my shoulders whispering away in my ears because if I don't then I'm just being a hypocrite when writing about his erratic behaviour. It should also help you connect the dots in how I end up publishing posts on a Portuguese footballing giant written in English which it transpires is an incredibly stupid idea, because if you're Portuguese, then why the fuck would you choose to read this over something written in your mother tongue? I've had worse ideas though in my life and what I've inadvertently ended up producing to date is a blow by blow account of two back to back title winning seasons starting from day one. I fully subscribe to the old adage that goes - People living in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. It should be noted in addition that I also steadfastly refuse to use the colloquial term outside of Portugal for the club name which doesn't help me. But like they say at the start of Goodfellas “Do you know why? It was out of respect.” This is a story about Sporting Clube de Portugal, but first the part about me -

They say as a football fan that you never forget your first game and I'm happy to confirm for you dear reader that this rings true in my case. It was 1986 and as a birthday treat I was taken to watch Ipswich Town at Portman Road play Manchester City which finished 0-0. I use the term treat very loosely there. Despite them being my local team that tawdry 90 minutes was enough to convince me that they weren't the club for me. I have a vague memory that there's a photo of me aged one month old wrapped in a blue and white scarf on the day they won the FA Cup final in 1978 but for me that doesn't count and I've never once considered them a choice in who to follow. That summer I spent two weeks of the school holidays palmed off to my aunties in Essex and by the time I came back I'd been indoctrinated into being a West Ham fan. My old man however had no intention of ever taking me to see them play and so in the end I did what all good sons do and followed the club he supported who ironically were based 180 miles away and for the majority of my life we're a shit second division team. They enjoyed one season in the top flight of English football in the late 1980s followed by a swift relegation the season after and the best part of two decades trying to avoid either relegation or complete financial meltdown, sometimes both at the same time just for the added stress. It's fair to say I got bullied at school for my choice of club and I wasn't helped by being the fat kid and also the smartest of my age group which saw me put up a year. Aren't childhoods great? If you're a regular reader of this blog a lot of things probably just clicked into place. You'll notice for legal reasons I'm avoiding the use of names.

Years later with the advent of the internet, myself and three other like minded fans decided to set up a fans page which would grow into ‘the’ most notorious of all the club’s sites, largely fuelled by my massive alcohol consumption at the time and propensity towards keyboard Tourette’s. I am reliably informed that I have over the years been the cause of many broken electronic appliances from readers spitting out their drinks laughing and came close to getting one poor follower the sack when instead of listening to his boss in a meeting was instead busy reading my latest rant on his phone under the table and burst out laughing uncontrollably. I can't be held responsible for the actions of others. 

At the height of its popularity we were averaging 750,000 views a month, the club was by then in the Premier League and dominating the front and back pages of the English newspapers for all the wrong reasons and I had found myself being used as an unofficial mouthpiece for the clubs owner. If that part sounds crazy enough, that was only because of an investigation on the previous owners I'd undertaken who I quickly figured out at the time of their takeover were chancers and clearly didn't have the type of wealth or contacts they claimed to have in the sports world and went very public with the information. Despite that they still made attempts to bring us into the fold and whilst every other group fawned over them, we held our position, adamant they were nothing more than glorified tyre kickers. The backlash was immense and I was personally roundly criticised for it, only to ultimately end up with me proven to have been right all along and one of the owners was sentenced to a prison sentence for fraud. I'd like to tell you that I was the bigger person and didn't go down the route of - I told you so, but as we've already established I was fully on my way to being in the grips of alcoholism. It did however inadvertently open my doors to see very well connected people and by well connected I mean very well connected people. That led to relationships formed with current and ex players and even secret mistresses. I could have sold what I knew for a fortune but access to that line of knowledge was based on trust and it what I knew I shared with the one person I trusted in turn to keep his mouth shut and to his eternal credit he did. 

In full it's a story that if laid out from end to end truly beggars belief but I was genuinely privy to all the inner workings of the club. Everyone who mattered fed me information behind the scenes. What I was told in confidence was ending up in the national press 24 to 48 hours later. It was the ultimate mind fuck, information came in, this one is classified for your eyes only, this you can use to go on the offensive and fuck me I was a horrible little cunt during that period. If someone was to draw me up a list of everyone I upset and offended I think it's no exaggeration to say that I could apologise to one person a day and not get through them all before I die. It's not a time in my life I'm proud of, my behaviour was quite frankly disgusting. If life with the club was messy then my drinking could make it appear sensible in comparison which if you knew the club in question is really saying something. I was out of control and basically setting fires to everyone else’s lives and all too frequently being used to settle other people's scores and vendettas. I was fucking good at it to with zero thought for the consequences of my actions and I caused chaos. My nickname in certain circles was the Firestarter after the popular Prodigy song of the time. As someone eloquently pointed out, I lit the matches and walked away from the ensuing inferno grinning. In the end I walked away from it all, gave the control of the site to someone else and felt I was pretty much done with football for life, it had taken more than it's pound of flesh from me. Unlike Bruno de Carvalho I might not have been club president but I ending up welding a lot of influence that had far reaching consequences for a lot of people. Watching public figures having to issue denials is quite surreal it must be said especially when you knew what the truth was. I knew the exit plan of the ownership from day one and watched it play out to perfection but it drove me to the brink. 

During that period my sleep had gotten so bad that I was running on Pacific Time and I had started watching Seattle Sounders at stupid o' clock in the morning because that was the club one of my dear friends at that time followed. Unlike me living in England, she was actually living in Seattle and therefore for her running on the correct time. I knew that putting my life back together meant 3am kick offs for me wasn't going to be a good idea but I did fall in love with Fredy Montero. I swapped football and alcoholism for photography and fresh air and made friends with an amazing photographer in Portugal whose club happened to be Sporting CP and you'll forgive me for having taken the long way round to getting to that point because I thought the context above was important. Having made the mistake of asking about Sporting Lisbon, a mistake I only ever made once, I noticed that Fredy Montero was on loan and I thought to myself - maybe I'll give them a watch. So whereas I can remember my first ever game I went to, it never crossed my mind that 12 years later I'd still be watching Sporting CP week in and week out, otherwise I'd have paid more attention. I was hooked from day one. The first question I asked, and apologies for this not being very PC, was - who's the fat guy in the suit on the bench?

Oh that's Bruno de Carvalho.

What does he do?

He's the president.

What like the Chairman of the club?

Yeah.

What the fucks he doing on the bench?

He always sits there.

What the fuck? There'd be a fucking riot if he did that in England. 

I am of course paraphrasing, I don't remember the exact words used between us both but I can clearly remember thinking what the fuck? As a fully paid up agent of chaos I was drawn in like a fly to shit. This was peak period for flares coming onto the pitch and every ground had a fire marshall whose sole job was to put the flares in a sand bucket. Definitely not something you'd have ever have seen in the English game. The colours and the sounds were something to he marvelled at and it was pretty much love at first sight. Since then I've missed one half of a game because I stupidly listened to someone else tell me a wrong kick off time. I think that was maybe about ten years ago and up until this season I’d not missed a league game until this season when they didn't broadcast the Moreirense game because it clashed with the Benfica one. I'm still sulking now. I think I found about twenty minutes of the second half in the end. So technically I've seen at least some of every game since the very first one. Full admission, I started on dodgy feeds when pop ups would ping at you left right and centre and Christ knows what viruses I inflicted on my laptops over the years but I'm sure I'm not the only one. Thankfully access to games is 99 times out of 100 straight forward now and more importantly legal to boot. I write these posts to get the words out from between my ears and to keep me concentrated on the game when in play otherwise I'd be off doing six other things instead. I don't think my view is important and let's face it only an idiot would write in English about a Portuguese club. No one reads it in Portugal and it's never going to reach 750,000 views a month and amen to a God I don't believe in for that fact. It's not healthy but for the story I'm about to tell, it's important for you to know how I got here and just how badly I fucked up, because as they say, it takes one to know one. I should clarify it is read though, all around the world and the list of territories is always growing and always mind blowing. It's just not read in Portugal. Define irony. 

We're fast approaching the eighth anniversary of the attacks on Sporting players at their training complex in Alcochete and in a season where Andre Vilas-Boas and FC Porto have used the press and media like a modern day Joseph Goebbels for their propaganda and bullshit, I'll remind you all for a second time that people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. Because Sporting CP under Bruno de Carvalho, the fat bloke in the suit on the bench, was box office viewing for the rest of Portugal and his infamy during that period was so great that even the English press covered the fall out of it all. Calling West Ham’s then owners David Sullivan and David Gold - The Dildo Brothers only strengthened his infamy.