Football, Economy, Education and The Example of Club Athletico Paranaense

Legal Area: Corporate Law

In this moment of acute crisis, it was not enough to add new dramas and new difficulties to a country marked by inequality and corruption, there is a need to create mechanisms to protect the public against opportunists who intend to take advantage of different situations to obtain personal benefits or to provide gains to the interest groups they represent.

In football, the situation is the same; and it is currently manifested from two perspectives.

In one, the agents that dominate the political-club environment use their energies in the recurrence of parasitic practices that aim to transfer to the State and the taxpayer the burden of structural incompetence in the management of football, through forgiveness, installment payment and / or deferral of tax obligations; in another, they intend to manipulate the forwarding of reforms that are being processed in Congress to profit from the introduction of mechanisms that, in isolation, will not modify the core of power - and will, above all, generate contracts and status.

Football in Brazil has always been marginalized by official politics. The marginalization is not due to the lack of relevance of sport, but to the intentional manipulation of what is a powerful instrument of communication with the masses and ends up also serving as a means of appropriating their sources of wealth.

It is, moreover, a global activity, billionaire (in revenues, fans, practitioners and other references) and that could - or could - function as (i) inducer of educational insertion, (ii) catalyst of social transformations and (iii) means of economic development; characteristics that are, moreover, the principles forming PL 5.516 / 19, authored by Senator of the Republic Rodrigo Pacheco (DEM / MG) - which, at that moment, passes through the necessary and legitimate process of convergence with PL 5.082-A, of rapporteur of Federal Deputy Pedro Paulo (DEM / RJ).

The potential of the most followed activity in the country - there are approximately 145 million people who follow football with greater or lesser intensity, a number that not even the presidential election reaches - is revealed in the feat of a club that was once considered regional, but which, due to competences, seems to be heading towards the top of the Latin American ranking.

If Manchester City, a team with no great tradition, whose real importance boiled down to a local rivalry with Manchester United, became one of the five or six biggest forces in the world (in 2017/2018, it reached the fifth largest revenue on the planet and, in 2018/2019, the sixth, according to the Football Money League report, produced by Deloitte), Club Athletico Paranaense ("Athletico"), from the moment it has access to the capital market, can become one of the five main forces of Latin American football (or much more, even) - and, in my opinion, it will not be so if other teams considered large or traditional (such as São Paulo, Santos, Vasco, Botafogo, Fluminense, Inter, Grêmio, Atlético and Cruzeiro) print an improbable and profound transformation in their models of ownership of the football and governance company.

Athletico's economic results are already well-known, and motivated Journalist Juca Kfouri to publish a text called "Athletico leaves Corinthians and São Paulo behind", in which it is indicated, with reference to the studies carried out by Pluri Consultoria, that 2019 was the the most expressive year of the team from Paraná, with the production of the 6th largest revenue in the country (R $ 390,173,000.00).

What few people may know is that the structure led by the chairman of the Administrative Council, Mario Celso Petraglia, is also committed to a social program, ranging from welfare to educational responsibility. Through the Athletico Paranaense Foundation ("Funcap"), 211 soccer schools operate in Brazil and abroad, many of them non-profit, and, even more relevant, the construction of an vocational school, with bilingual education, which (i) will serve children and youth members of the grassroots categories, (ii) extend to the same groups in the community in which it (the school) will be located and (iii) adopt, in accordance with Roberto Bonnet, executive director of Funcap, a teaching system similar to Waldorf.

Athletico's economic results and inclusive projects, achieved even within the framework of a legal environment forged in the 19th century and disconnected from its time, reinforce the importance and urgency of the proposals for certain incentives, by means of a legislative initiative pending in the Federal Senate , which can raise Brazilian football activity to a level of relevance consistent with the sizes of its history, its mystique and its audience.

In this sense, Section I of Chapter II of PL 5.516 / 19 creates the debenture-fut: security to be regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission - CVM, which may be issued and offered to the general public by the club-company constituted under the form of football corporation (SAF), and will subject the income earned by natural persons resident in the country to tax at zero rate, and by legal entities or investment funds domiciled in the country or by any investor resident or domiciled abroad, to tax with a 15% rate.

At the same time, Section II of the same Chapter of the aforementioned PL establishes the educational development program for football, which authorizes the deduction, of the taxable profit earned by SAF, of an amount equivalent to twice the expenses evidenced in a given base year, provided that they are employed in duly approved agreements whose purpose is (i) to encourage the attendance of students enrolled in public schools, (ii) the involvement and interest of students in the educational activities promoted by the public school and (iii) the contribution to the education and training of students public school students.

Such incentives, inserted in a system designed to build a sustainable, efficient, transparent model that generates jobs, income and revenue, could intensify and accelerate the process of nationalization or internationalization, as the case may be, of teams such as Athletico itself, the from the adoption of corporate types that enable access to local and international financial resources, and rescue, by the same means, regional or national clubs, small or large, which have become, due to mistakes and the cartolar system, mass administrators bankrupt, and that resist, without fulfilling their social, educational and economic functions, only by the strength of their fans; unconditional situation, therefore, with the magnitude or potentialities that they should express.

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Rodrigo Monteiro de Castro Rodrigo Monteiro de Castro

Rodrigo Monteiro de Castro is specialized in corporate and business laws, corporate transactions (M&A), capital markets and contracts.

São Paulo - Brazil

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