Joao Luiz: My (Unsubstantiated) Theory on the Strangest Signing in MLS History
A sordid family affair!
When we discuss the history of the worst signings in Major League Soccer history, an awful lot of New York/New Jersey MetroStars appear on our lists. The famously poor signing of Lotthar Mattheus is is only a grain of sand on the beach of ineptitude that plagued that club back in the early days. In this week’s post we’ll discuss the tale of a lanky, nondescript center-back from Brazil who was supposed to be the answer to Metro’s defensive woes way back in the 1997 season. That center-back’s name? Joao Luiz.
I first started researching Joao after reading a Big Soccer discussion board from a few years ago. Some fans were bandying about their lists of the biggest, most blundery busts of signings in the history of the fledgling league. One name caught my eye, and that was Joao Luiz. A quick Google would reveal the surface details necessary to begin our tale: Luiz was a tall central defender, signed by the MetroStars from Rio de Janeiro-based club Vasco Da Gama in 1997, with the goal of shoring up a leaky defense that finished seventh of ten teams in MLS’ maiden season. Having been a longtime MetroStars/Red Bulls fan, I was shocked and disappointed with myself that I hadn’t recognized this name. I quickly found out that it would have indeed been stranger if I HAD recognized it, given that Mr. Luiz played a total of seven games for the MetroStars before suffering a season-ending ankle injury and returning to his native Brazil at the end of the campaign.
Then, I got to researching. What promised to be a silly story of an inept player who just happened to be a swing-and-a-miss by Metro’s front office, turned into a tale of international intrigue and corruption, spanning multiple continents and World Cups. Buckle up, my friends, as it’s sure to be a bumpy ride.
New York City is perhaps the most cosmopolitan, international city in the Western Hemisphere. It comes as no surprise, then, that Major League Soccer has been desperate from the onset to have a successful club and brand representing them in the Big Apple. Heck, New Yorkers loved the Cosmos of the Pele and Franz Beckenbauer, so why wouldn’t they take to a star-studded lineup with the likes of Roberto Donadoni and Tab Ramos playing out at Giants Stadium? On the contrary, the club was stricken early on by a problem which has plagued countless New York sports franchises throughout history: they were bad.
Who was the brave soul tasked with taking MLS’s flagship franchis and cutting a perennial powerhouse out of whole-cloth, you ask? Let’s meet: Carmelo “Charlie” Stillitano. Charlie grew up in northern New Jersey, and, being the son of Italian immigrants, became absolutely soccer obsessed. He played alongside Bob Bradley at the famous Pingry School. Stillitano claims that his dad, a wheeler-dealer soccer businessman-type, had a relationship with Brazilian club Santos, which is why he was able to arrange a series of friendlies between Santos and the likes of West Ham and Lazio at the old Roosevelt Stadium in Union City, New Jersey.
In an interview with the late, great Grant Wahl, Stillitano gives a bonkers account of working as a ball-boy during a particularly spicy affair between Pele’s Santos and Roman club Lazio in May of 1973. This snippet seemingly speaks volumes about Stillitano’s general vibe, including his relatively tenuous relationship with the truth: “Another time Lazio came over to play Santos there. It was 1973. Santos had seven national team players from the 1970 world champions, arguably the greatest team ever. I was an Italy fan, still heartbroken about the loss in the World Cup final. They offered me Pelé’s jersey, and I said no. He broke my heart when I was 10 and they beat Italy.”
Here, the thirteen-year old, soccer-obsessed Stillitano refuses what we can only assume is a genuine, game-worn jersey from Pele. I myself was a fairly volatile and emotional sports fan as a youth, but even if one of the great Darth Vaders of my childhood, your Tom Bradys or Frank Lampards, offered me an authentic jersey, I’d have bitten their hand off for it.
Stillitano continues: “So Lazio is playing Santos in Jersey City. Whenever Pelé would leave the field in those days, he had to leave unexpectedly and early. Otherwise, people would run onto the field. Santos was winning 3-0. There’s 30,000 people in the stadium. I’m a ball kid. So Lazio got a penalty, and then Pelé ran off the field! You’re talking Pelé in the early ‘70s. People are ripping his clothes off. I remember him in a jockstrap throwing his socks off for people.”
This section is seemingly corroborated by the New York Times report of the game. It mentions that fans hurled chairs and beers onto the playing field, and that Pele took off his iconic number 10 shirt to fool the fans but that some eagle-eyed, drunken New Jersians managed to recognize him anyway. The report, however, mentions that this incident took place at the end of the first half, rather than at the end of the game. The report itself is worth a read, given how clumsy and naive it sounds to an audience used to modern, nuanced sports writing.
Stillitano continues:“So cops come out on horseback in Jersey City. It’s mayhem. And a cop tells me: ‘Get in the goal.’ There’s no goalkeeper for the penalty. So I’m in the goal, there’s horses and cops, and who’s at the penalty spot? Giorgio Chinaglia! So help me God. And he kicks it in the goal.”
First of all, why wouldn’t the cop find literally ANYONE else besides a 13 year-old ballboy? Cops don’t have authority over soccer games; you’re thinking of referees! And where was the original goalie? Did he run after Pele for an autograph, too?
Stillitano again: “Years later, I’m on the radio with Giorgio [they had a regular show on SiriusXM before Chinaglia passed away in 2012] telling the story of how I met Pelé in the 3-0 game against Lazio. And Giorgio says, ‘It was 3-1. I scored.’ And I say: ‘You didn’t score against Santos! I was the goalie!’”
Chinaglia seems to have an excellent memory, given that he can remember the score of an exhibition played more than thirty years ago. We can’t, however, say the same for his perceptiveness, given that he did not pick up on the fact that in goal, attempting to save his penalty was not Brazilian goalkeeper, Claudio, but instead a thirteen year-old Italian-American ball boy who would never stand taller than five-foot ten, even as a grown adult.
This absolutely bonkers story does more than highlight Charlie’s wanton disregard for accuracy in story telling: it also speaks to the circles Charlie continues to run in to this very day when it comes to rich and powerful people in the global soccer community.
After graduating from Princeton, where he played soccer for four years, Charlie decided to get a law degree. He seems to have stayed in the orbit of the sports world, and eventually that paid off when he was named the venue director of Giants Stadium for the 1994 World Cup. He parlayed this into an offer to be the General Manager of the newly-minted New York/New Jersey Metrostars, in which job he immediately set about making splash signings such as Roberto Donadoni, Tab Ramos, Tony Meola, and Giovani Savarese.
An interesting aside: Major League Soccer was due to begin play in 1995, but due to financial concerns pushed the commencement of the league until 1996. Stillitano used this pause as an opportunity to organize a new edition of a tournament of club friendlies called the “Parmalat Cup,” enticing the likes of Parma, Boca Juniors, the US Men’s National Team, and Benfica to the Meadowlands for some of that sweet, sweet preseason revenue.
As kickoff in 1996 approached, the MetroStars still found themselves short a coach. Stillitano and the ownership, understandably interested in a splashy name for the position, decided on former NASL superstar coach Eddie Firmani, who only lasted through eight games before stepping down after, according to Stillitano, “there was tension and misunderstanding between the players and coach.”
Stillitano, bafflingly effective at using his international connections to convince people to work for him, was then able to wrangle former Portugal Carlos Queiroz to right the ship for the rest of the season. Queiroz, if the name sounds familiar, has coached eight different national teams, as well as Real Madrid, and has appeared at the last four World Cups. He’s currently the manager of the Qatar national team. Quieroz managed to qualify the MetroStars for the playoffs by virtue of finishing third in the Eastern Conference, but bailed after a first-round defeat to DC United in favor of a much higher-paying job in Japan.
The following season, Stillitano was determined to go even bigger in his search for a managerial mastermind to take the MetroStars to the highest heights of the burgeoning league. Enter: Carlos Alberto Gomes Parreira.
Parreira, a well-traveled, highly-respected manager from Rio de Janeiro, holds the distinction of having been the man to break Brazil’s twenty-four year World Cup drought as he coached the star-studded Canarinha team to the title at the 1994 contest held in the United States. By 1997, when Parreira accepted the MetroStars offer to coach, he had already led three different nations to the World Cup Finals: Kuwait in 1982, the UAE in 1990, and the aforementioned Brazil in 1994. MLS and MetroStars officials were reportedly over the moon about his signing, given that Parreira would certainly add much-needed legitimacy to the league, which was hemorrhaging money in the early days and would eventually go on to fold in 2001 for the span of 48 hours, althought nobody found out about that until years later when it was revealed that Lamar Hunt, then-owner of both the Columbus Crew and Kansas City Wizards, rallied the rest of the league’s owners to invest their own funds to keep things afloat.
Early MLS clubs, much like today, were beholden to byzantine, American sports-style rules surrounding things like a salary cap and roster size requirements. Parreira struggled to adapt. When told by team executives that his roster was one player too big, he reportedly cut Ezra Hendrickson at random rather than learn what the actual rules were. He also insisted the club buy Mike Sorber, since he was the only American player Parreira could even remember from the 1994 World Cup team.
Stillitano and Parreira, acting in tandem much like a stack of raccoons in a trench coat, knew that a splashy signing would be just what the doctor ordered to get the fans off their backs for subpar performances. Parreira insisted that the club pursue Brazil international Juninho Paulista from Middlesbrough, but was stymied when MLS leadership refused to break salary cap rules to approve the signing.
A compromise of sorts was reached and the MetroStars agreed to sign Brazilian defender Guido from Chinese outfit Shanghai Shenua (I’ve been to their stadium to buy a shirt and they were using it as a makeshift driving range that day). But one Brazilian was not enough, and Parreira insisted that the club pay one million American dollars to Brazilian club Vasco de Gama for a center-back named Joao Luiz. What made the transfer fee even stranger was that Luiz had only ever played a single game for Vasco, and there didn’t really seem to be any sort of bidding war for the player. A popular theory at the time held that Joao Luiz was a carpenter who’d done work on Parreira’s house in Rio de Janeiro.
The $1 million was paid in the end, and Guido and Joao Luiz arrived together at the MetroStars. The club went out of their way to settle them in Newark, New Jersey’s Ironbound neighborhood, a hotspot for Brazilian expats and Portuguese-speaking culture, even appointing former New York Cosmos player Santiago Formoso as a sort of “cultural liaison” to help the players bed-in to their new surroundings.
When pressed by journalists, Parreira insisted that he’d first spotted Luiz playing for Vasco in 1994. This passes muster, as Parreira was then coach of Brazil and would’ve been keeping tabs on any and all talented domestic players.
The MetroStars of 1997 year suffered through an almost comically-bad season, finishing second-to-last out of ten teams and bearing the ignominy of being the only one out of five teams in the Eastern Conference to fail to reach the playoffs. Joao Luiz himself made only seven appearances, even falling in comical fashion against the San Jose Clash which led to a goal, before he was forced out for the rest of the year with a knee injury.
Parreira would soon be out, accepting a lucrative offer from the Saudi Football Association to lead their men’s national team. He left behind a culture of dysfunction and stubbornness, which some may argue continues in the New York Red Bulls to this very day!
Stillitano moved on from the MetroStars in 2003 after participating in a series of disastrous signings of players and coaches alike. His name was predictably attached to the European Super League debacle of the late 2010s, as he continues to grift along in US soccer circles, trading on his storied past and penchant for peddling bullshit.
The move for Luiz doesn’t even rank with the most embarrassing things the MetroStars/Red Bulls have ever done, and it doesn’t move the needle of fan anger the way the signings of Mattheus and Rafa Marquez do. When I asked longtime Metro/Red Bulls reporter Mark Fishkin what he remembered about Luiz’s signing, he responded: “Honestly? Not a damn thing.”
But the question is still out there, pleading to be answered: WHY ON EARTH DID THE METROSTARS SPEND A MILLION DOLLARS ON A GUY WHO NEVER EVEN PLAYED PROFESSIONAL SOCCER?
I have a theory.
When researching Joao Luiz, I stumbled upon the fact that he’s got a famous uncle: former Brazil National Team left-back Válber. Válber was first-choice in the lead-up to the 1994 World Cup and even made twelve appearances for A Canarinha under the management of, you guessed it, Carlos Parreira!
A spectacular attacking wingback of the modern mold, Válber plied his trade at Sao Paulo in the Brazilian league, even winning the Copa Libertadores in 1993, playing all ninety minutes in both legs of the final against Chilean side Universidad Catholica. Sao Paulo even defeated FC Barcelona in the Intercontinental Cup in 1992, although Válber did not appear in the final.
Válber seemed to be a guaranteed starter for the Brazil team that would go on to win the 1994 World Cup, breaking a 20-year curse and ushering in a new era of Brazilian dominance that spanned the nineties and early 2000s. However, Válber’s name is conspicuously absent from the winners list. What could’ve possibly happened?
Well, Válber had a reputation as a bit of a partier, it turns out. He was accused of being the player whose partying habits led to the Brazil team being robbed during a 1993 tour of the United States, with someone reportedly using his room key to access the Brazil team’s hotel while they played a game at RFK stadium in Washington, DC. Fellow defender Julio Cesar reportedly refused to return to the Brazil team until he was reimbursed for $30,000 stolen from his hotel room on that fateful night.
Válber was locked in as a starter for Parreira’s Brazil leading up to the tournament, but for some strange reason was dropped from the team in the spring of 1994. This came after a string of injuries and all-around bizarre circumstances for Brazilian defenders, leaving Parreira’s squad dangerously thin. Defender Mozer of Juventus refused to attend Brazil training because he was too busy suing a Portuguese newspaper for claiming that he had AIDS. (It turned out that he suffered from hepatitis instead.) Ricardo Gomes was injured in training. Válber injured himself in training, but instead of attending his medical treatment sessions, he snuck away from Brazil’s facility in Granja Comary to party at nightclubs.
For this latest indiscretion, Válber, along with fellow defender Muller, was finally dropped from Parreira’s Brazil.
It’s no wonder Parreira cut Válber; it seems that the defender just couldn’t be relied on. According to Válber’s one-time coach at Clube Paulista, Joao Francisco “Válber killed his grandparents three times and punctured his car tire 700 times in the time he played for me.” But being dropped from Brazil was devastating to him, as he’d been almost guaranteed to represent his country at a World Cup if only he could’ve managed NOT to sneak out of medical treatment to go partying! To put in perspective how guaranteed he was to make the squad, consider that he even appeared as a sticker in the 1994 Panini World Cup album!
Válber would spend the rest of his career bouncing around the top teams of the Brazilian league, taking home another Copa Libertadores and various Brazilian league titles before his career petering out in the mid-2000s. Válber notably played at Vasco de Gama from 1997 to 2000. He would be briefly reunited with former Brazil manager Carlos Parreira in 1996 while both were at Sao Paulo, and then again in 1999 at Fluminese. If you’re keeping score at home, this is both immediately before AND after Parreira’s stint at the New York/New Jersey MetroStars.
This brings us back to Válber’s nephew, Joao Luiz. Carlos Parreira has always been known as a players’ coach, and it stands to reason that he might have felt just the slightest bit guilty about having left Válber off the 1994 team. It must have stung especially when Válber witnessed his teammates lift the World Cup trophy for the first time in twenty years. It must have stung ESPECIALLY especially when Válber witnessed his teammate Muller, who had been dropped for similar disciplinary reasons, be welcomed back into the side.
Before the 1994 World Cup, Válber was reportedly on the verge of making a lucrative move to a top European league, with both Milan clubs reportedly interested in signing the defender. His fall from grace with Brazil all but scuppered any chance he had at moving overseas.
We finally arrive at the crux of my unsubstantiated theory: Carlos Parreira, wracked with guilt at torpedoing the career of a player with whom he had a mostly positive on-field relationship for many years, agreed to sign his nephew for an exorbitant amount of money from Vasco de Gama (where Válber himself played at the time!) as a sort of penance.
Let me know if I’m on to something, or if this is completely deranged. See you next week!