16 ms·
A Soccer Con Man Who Couldn't Play the Game
- dmoy 10y agoWow that's wild. I guess it's nice to learn that despite technology opening up the doors to so many other cons, it also closes the doors to some older avenues. I'd venture a guess that the former significantly outweighs the latter, which is too bad, but oh well.
- kazinator 10y agoIt's surprising that he wasn't uncovered through player stats. If a newspaper headline hints about someone's scoring ability, wouldn't a few people get curious and look up the actual stats in some soccer almanac to see how good it is. Maybe that data wasn't easy to come by. In any sport that supports a national stats-gathering bureaucracy, that would be hard to get away with. E.g. baseball in the USA: you know everyone's "batting average" and so on. (Not to mention that when players are traded, the teams or clubs have access to this info!)
- jjnoakes 10y agoIt's hard to believe that no rumors were circulated among the players or coaches of different teams, or at least, they were never strong enough for a single person to investigate seriously. Especially with the amount of money they must have been paying for nothing. Although I guess if the fans are happy, the money is well spent...?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- mathattack 10y agoRepeat con men thrive on their victims being too embarrassed to publicly call them out.
- jjnoakes 10y agoI'm not talking about publicly calling anyone out. I'm surprised the coaches and players on teams taking him in didn't hear enough rumors from the coaches and players on the teams he was leaving to make them suspicious enough to investigate his ability themselves (or even watch him work the ball for more than a few seconds).
- mathattack 10y agoEven then, coaches wouldn't want to fess up being hoodwinked. Looks bad!
- RubyPinch 10y agoIt might of been like, when he was starting out, no one really cared to look, after he was famous, anyone who noticed anything would of just assumed it was a stint of bad luck, otherwise he wouldn't be famous!
- caseysoftware 10y agoThere's an emperor looking for his new clothes too..
- wnevets 10y agoReminds me the story of the con man who tried to buy the Islanders. People were told he was rich and just believed whatever terrible excuse he came up with about why he didn't have the money. "If he wasn't rich how'd he make it this far? Surely someone must've checked" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Spano https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Spano
- 10y ago
- djhworld 10y agoReminds me a little of Ali Dia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Dia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Dia Might not have been a con as such, but amusing none the less.
- mzs 10y agoReminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Keane https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Keane
- rexreed 10y agoWow - in reading about Walter Keane, I came across this old Life magazine article about his wife... but then I noticed all the OTHER articles in this magazine and I can't believe all the amazing stuff being written about here: a new AI bot from MIT and Stanford, the World Trade Center being built in NYC, computerization of India, Korea starting to manufacture semiconductors, and more... WOW: https://books.google.com/books?id=2FMEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA56-IA1#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=2FMEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA56-IA1#v...
- rublev 10y agoThis reminds me of Elmyr de Hory. I watched him one of Orson Wells last movies "F for Fake" and I have no idea what to make of it.
- raverbashing 10y agoReplace Soccer with pretty much anything and you can find similar examples. Yes, even in the IT field
- yuncun 10y agoHard to fake injury tho
- greedo 10y agoWith HIPAA, employers really can't ask too many questions, and with the ability to "work from home" you can hide easily. Eventually they catch on, but it takes awhile. I've worked with a network "engineer" who pulled in six figures, while doing basically nothing.
- lordnacho 10y agoHow many of you have not worked with someone whom you suspected of not being able to program, despite being paid to do so? Here's a description of an ex colleague of mine: - Asked me after 7 years about whether a system existed that could tell you the state of the code at a given time. You know, because it's inconvenient saving different versions in separate files. - Can't do anything other than changing literals without breaking it. - Can't tell you what the difference between an object and a class is. - Pretends his job is higher level than coding. - Since he can't do anything, goes to meetings explaining how he's the architect behind it all. And gets credit for it.
- rdtsc 10y agoYap saw it. A large company someone new hired. Hung around for about a year, managed to write 100 lines of code. Only 10 were ever accepted after peer review. However come meeting time, would be very vocal about random technologies -- we'd talk about spawning a process and he'd chime in how you can do this complicated kernel trick with signals, or shared memory and whatnot. At first everyone was impressed. Heck, I was. After a while nobody saw any results from him though. When came time to show his results he started to claim to have health issues. So was gone for a while. After a couple of months the manager caught on and kept assigning him different tasks hoping they'd finally find something he's good at. Would get as simple task, yet instead of just doing it, he would re-frame as some complicated theoretical problem, which needed research and the solution needed something like P vs NP solved in order to deliver it. Not sure if someone in the end explicitly told him that "Look Pete, it is a test function, just write the test function. You don't have to solve P vs NP to do it". (Pete is not his real name) But yeah he was invited to depart, after collected a nice salary for about a year. He's probably at another company now doing the same thing.
- dunkelheit 10y agoSimilarly, impossibility results in distributed systems theory can act as a pretty good cover. Something along the lines of "You know, in a distributed setting you cannot distinguish node failure from delays in communication. So no, I won't be writing monitoring scripts for this service. They will be useless."
- dajohnson89 10y agoAt risk of being called overly-PC, I must point out that the opening sentence is could be seen as objectifying women: >Brazilian soccer star Carlos Kaiser had it all: exclusive contracts with popular teams, money, fame, and women. I normally don't point out things like this, because hyper-sensitivity to things that are often considered "offensive" when they really aren't can be annoying. But I can't see how to interpret this other than "women" being a possession. To be fair, the author isn't likely being malicious, and I think he just means that he's receiving the attention of lots of women. Such attention is, arguably, an "object" in the sense of a commodity in the social marketplace ("that guy has a lot of women" is often seen as a compliment whether you like it or not). But still, I'm surprised at how much the author's choice of words bothered me. I don't even identify as a feminist in the traditional sense....shrug.
- gakada 10y agoAre you saying the author is being unfair on the average footballer by implying that they objectify women? :)
- Normal_gaussian 10y agoWhilst I have friends I don't own them. I endeavour to obtain more friends, and I judge people as to whether they would be the kind of friend that I want - short or long term. To describe somebody as 'having' women is often accurate and useful - I do not see why this should be penalised. Now what does confuse and upset me is the way in which we rarely describe women as being able to have lots of men - the slut problem. Enjoying regular sex and really exploring it, like any other hobby, seems incredibly reasonable. Hoping to enjoy lots of sex sounds like something anybody should want, and I don't see why this is limited as a descriptor for men only. In short, pretty much everybody likes a good fucking - why are we afraid to say it?
- kajecounterhack 10y agoTo describe somebody as 'having' women is often accurate and useful - I do not see why this should be penalised. Can you also see that someone might find this language offensive? That 'having a woman' is somehow vernacular but you don't really see women being described as having 'money, fame, men' ? The language makes women sound like they are possessions.
- rdtsc 10y agoThis applies to the startup scene. I have seen it first hand, someone managed to convince a few investors who were old and not very quick thinking that they should invest in his company. The product idea was just awkward and made up. It was as if someone is given a 5 minute task to quickly think of a startup idea. But he was a good smooth talker, so millions of dollars later down the drain, with a private office in the Valley, he can now claim he was a serial entrepreneur, CEO, mentor. He'd go to all meetups and give talks. Would publish a blog post here and there so he was also an "author". Every time he was asked to present his product or asked when it was going to be shipped, he'd claim he saw this trendy technology at a meetup (last was some container thing) and claimed he needed to rewrite his stack using that to go "faster". That lasted for close to 5 years. People claim it was a failure. I claim it was a major success for him. He's probably off to the next adventure. Not bad overall. Ride the hype and you'll make it!
- betolink 10y agoI totally see this not only in the startup scene but life in general! in every trade there is a charlatan that will fake mastery of the skills needed to succeed.
- rrecuero 10y agoI have definitely seen this happening as well. Being the hype and cool factor of startups, wantrepreneurs are sprouting everywhere. It is usually easy to spot them, all talk and nothing to show.
- nononosisisi 10y agoIt describes Trump to a tee.
- 67726e 10y agoJust quit a job working for a guy exactly like that. He worked it for three years, and he damn well might make it last longer. In my case we had a fully working product. You could have sold the fuck out of it but instead we always needed a different UI. Instead he spends his time playing on the company card at the bar or spending his time on every local interest group board. All while "payroll glitches" left the only people working unpaid. It's sick.
- fauria 10y agoThere are some stories where reality surpass fiction. In addition to this, I found the story of Frédéric Bourdin to be hard to beleive yet real. The 2012 documentary The Imposter tells the story in an astounding way: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1966604/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1966604/
- NTDF9 10y agoYou see this everywhere. I saw this in school. Some kids got good grades but really knew jack shit. The grades were a result of memorizing, cheating, plagiarizing assignments, great rapport with professor and TA, great recommendations. All this and now, working at top tech company.
- tedmiston 10y agoInteresting that the article is almost a section by section copy of his Wikipedia page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Kaiser_(footballer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Kaiser_(footballer)
- zumu 10y agoSomehow fitting...
- BoozerDoozer 10y agoI find this story very hard to believe or grossly exaggerated. I mean this is soccer we're talking about, not brain surgery. If you plucked a random reasonably healthy person who had never seen a soccer ball in his/her life off any street in America say, and put them in a pro club with a contract and daily training with other pros, that person would probably become a reasonably good soccer player. Was it really harder for him to just, well you know, play than to fake it for 20 something odd years?
- flukus 10y agoApparently you are completely unaware of just how highly skilled they players are at this level. If anyone could do it they would, it's a highly desirable career.
- jwdunne 10y agoThis is correct. Football is "our thing" in the UK. Even in high school, some kids just had a knack for it and could run rings around everyone. There was no amount of training you could do to catch up to them. None of these kids went on to play professional football - they weren't good enough.
- advertising 10y agoMy favorite of all is the story of Elmyr de Hory who was the greatest art forger of all time. Something like $60million or more worth of fake art sold in his lifetime? Some of his Picasso's and others they say still hang in museums too afriad to admit they are fakes. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elmyr_de_Hory https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elmyr_de_Hory Orsen Welles did a great movie on him and fakery in general - http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gIVgUjj6RxU http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gIVgUjj6RxU The question of who are the real fakers in the art world, the forger or the critics who are duped and swear that a painting is authentic. The tragedy of Elymr was that he was a great painter but no one cared for his original works and he was much more successful as a forger. The same for Clifford Irving, ironically, who wrote Elymr's biography. Irving wrote a fake biography of Howard Hues or something along those lines.
- billforsternz 10y agoAt the lower tiers of the professional game, Brazilian footballers have an advantage in foreign markets because their nationality has a kind of soccer mystique. I can't find the exact quote, it was from an agent, saying it was easier to place a mediocre Brazilian than a brilliant Mexican (Somewhere in the book "Futebol: The Brazilian Way of Life" by Alex Bellos). I know my local (second, third, maybe nth) tier professional team were very proud of three Brazilians, apparently obtained as a job lot. They came complete with single word names etc. After watching them play I was pretty sure the aquisition strategy was to pick three random twenty something dudes off the street of Sao Paulo or similar! These guys are sure to be good enough to play professionally in New Zealand right! To be fair one of the three could play and he made a decent career in Wellington. Daniel was his name if I remember correctly. It looks like this guy took some advantage of this "Brazilian factor", although it hardly explains his stints at huge clubs like Botafogo etc. in Brazil itself!
- B1FF_PSUVM 10y agoAny chance this piece itself is a fake? (Asking for a friend, as they say.)