Corinthians fans had had enough: armed with household items like brooms and boxes of soap powder, fans stormed the Sao Paulo club’s training base on Good Friday demanding a change – that the club cleans up its act. Corinthians is one of the country’s most loved and most confused clubs, and its owner, Media Sports Investment, is a mysterious organization tied to Kia Joorabchian, who orchestrated Carlos Tevez’s and Javier Mascherano’s move to England. Thankfully, this was a nonviolent protest, but one that Rob Hughes of the International Herald Tribune hopes reverberates across the Atlantic, too.
It’s been seven months since the Argentine pair was brought to West Ham (Mascherano is now at Liverpool), and we still don’t have a proper answer to the question, ‘who owns these guys?’ Corinthians’ owner MSI supposedly owns a piece of them, as does the Iranian businessman Joorabchian, but to what extent still remains under wraps. Hughes says Tevez and Mascherano aren’t the only players London-based MSI “moves around the globe like chattels for hire.”
Meanwhile, Mascherano and Tevez, like Corinthians, have endured a rough couple of years under the management of MSI. Says Hughes, “To this day, the authorities have no real clue who bankrolls MSI, or whether the Argentine and Brazilian media were fishing in deeply speculative waters when they stole out of Buenos Aires and arrived in São Paulo.” That was back in 2004, when MSI first moved the pair to Corinthians. Other questions arise, like, why did MSI pay their transfer fees and wages? What is the company after, and how does it make money?