Why footballers are targets for violence and crime

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Nearly 20 years ago, Brazilian soccer player Robinho was on the verge of moving from his home country, Brazil, to a big-money future in Europe.

One afternoon, two armed men burst into a family barbecue. They yelled out, “Who’s Dona Marina, Robinho’s mother?” The kidnappers bundled the 43-year-old housemaid into a car. Six weeks later, she was freed after her son paid a ransom.

When Robinho made his European move the next year, he took his entire extended family with him.

Ten years ago, Napoli’s ruling crime syndicate, the Camorra, took up against the local soccer club. It burgled the house of one star, and mugged his agent. It carjacked another star’s girlfriend. The wife of a third star was stripped of her belongings while walking down the street.

Local authorities suspected the crime wave was the gang’s way of convincing SSC Napoli to pay more protection money. The crimes stopped soon after they became international news.

These sorts of stories repeat across the world. The rich will always be targets, but few of them are as visible or as targeted as soccer players.

Owing to their fame, everyone knows where they live. Because of the nature of sports schedules, everyone knows when they’re away from home.

After Sunday’s thrashing of Senegal, the English national team should be celebrating its ascendance here in Qatar. All of a sudden, it is everyone’s new (and probably temporary) favourite to win it all.

Instead, the news out of the English camp is absent forward Raheem Sterling. He returned home before Sunday’s game to attend what his team called “a family matter.”

According to British reports, robbers broke into Sterling’s home while his partner and children were out. The thieves reportedly stole a half-million dollars worth of watches and jewellery. It’s not clear when, or if, Sterling will return to the team.

Whatever other worries they might have, North American athletes are not regularly targeted by criminals. When something does happen – say, Maple Leafs’ forward Mitch Marner being carjacked while out at the movies – it is major news. More often than not, the crime is random.

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In Europe, this sort of thing is a regular occurrence. So regular, that it just barely makes news unless it includes some lurid detail. Sterling was also a victim four years ago when a local gang tried, and failed, to break into his house using a ladder. That time he wasn’t home. The story didn’t make news until the robbers were being convicted.

Some of these schemes are Ocean’s Eleven-level complicated. Thieves pumped a noxious sedative through the air-conditioning system into the French Riviera vacation home of former Arsenal star Patrick Vieira. Once everyone was incapacitated, the robbers swiped a million euros worth of goods and drove away in Vieira’s car.

Others are brutally direct. Brazilian World Cup winner Roberto Carlos was on the phone doing a radio interview when someone stuck a gun in his face.

“They didn’t recognize me because I was sitting in the back seat,” the former Real Madrid player told the live radio audience. “I am shocked and very scared.”

In plenty of parts of the world, soccer and crime are synonymous. It’s expected that your success makes you a target. You do not dare leave your family behind when you go off to earn your fortune.

The trick is doing well enough to move to a rich European club, but leaving as soon as the numbers surrounding your move start getting bandied about in the press. Everyone knows a player in the Brazilian or Argentinean league is not getting stupidly rich. They also know that players get kicked back a portion of their transfer fee.

Robinho got caught in the criminal pincer – not yet rich, but already thought to be, and too familiar a face to hide.

This is why it doesn’t seem weird that at the height of his career, Lionel Messi was an unpaid ambassador for Interpol. He joined their Turn Back Crime campaign in 2014.

(Later, after Messi was convicted of tax fraud by a Spanish court, he had less to say about the pleasures of law enforcement.)

At the extreme end of things, soccer players are targeted for violence without an obvious profit motive. Even if they can’t tell you his name, everyone knows the story of the Colombian soccer player murdered two weeks after scoring an own-goal at the 1994 World Cup.

It says something about the cheek-by-jowl relationship of crime and sport in some places that it’s never been clear why that soccer player, Andres Escobar, was killed. He played for Atletico Nacional, at the time owned by narco-royalty, Pablo Escobar (no relation). That should have afforded him some protection. Clearly, it didn’t. The case still provokes fascination.

This does not begin even to cover the indignities visited on referees and other officials. Pablo Escobar was in the habit of kidnapping the ones who wouldn’t see his club in a favourable light.

There’s a whole other illegal sidebar devoted to corruption, which remains rampant in soccer in a way that would be difficult to imagine in any other sport.

Take the highly ironic example of Mohammed bin Hammam. He’s the Qatari businessman who oversaw the operation to buy this World Cup. He apparently lives around the corner from it in a Doha palace. But Bin Hammam played his political cards so wrong that he is barred from attending any of it. That’s the danger of being the frontman, and of getting a little too big for your britches in a country ruled by a monarchy.

All of it is sordid, which is another way of saying that it’s interesting. People are obsessed with soccer for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which that in some places it really is a matter of life and death. This element of personal risk won’t ever get featured in an Adidas campaign, but it drives people to the sport – and to the World Cup, in particular – nonetheless.