In 2005, a scandal of results manipulation shocked Brazilian football. The case known as “The Mafia of the whistle” brought to light a scheme involving referees Edílson Pereira de Carvalho and José Paulo Danelon in matches of that year’s Brazilian Championship.
Twenty years after the event, the series with the same nickname shows how it started the entire process and behind the scenes of the investigation and the complaint carried out by Veja Magazine at the time. The work was produced by the producer Feel The Match, in partnership with the SporTV.
In an interview with CNNBruno Maia, producer of the series, spoke about the backstage of the production process and told how it was to turn the case into audiovisual content.
Remember the case
A series of complaints indicated a game manipulation scheme in Serie A and B games. Referees Edilson Pereira de Carvalho and Paulo José Danelon interfered with the results of the matches to help gamblers to profit from combined scores.
Both were banned from football and denounced by the prosecutor by estelionato, gang formation and ideological falsehood. The cases came to public during the 2005 Brazilian Championship, making 11 matches be held again.
The scandal changed the classification of the competition, and the consecrated champion of that year, with three points ahead of second place, the Internacional. If the original results were kept, the gaucho club would have won the Brasileirão with a point more than the São Paulo team.
Motivation for the theme
“She (the story) had a great strength in the market that we operate today, from the series of crime, true crime. And I think the whistle mafia may be the bigger true crime Brazilianin the sense of being a crime of football, “explained Bruno.
The series features the testimonies of several people involved in the event, such as referee Edílson Pereira de Carvalho, businessman Nagib “Gibão” Fayad, journalists André Rizek and Thaís Oyama, among others.
In the chat with the CNNBruno Maia said her interest in the characters was the big motivator to delve into the subject.
“These are ordinary people, ordinary people who were there, a journalist, a prosecutor. A path of history was to show the great adventure that 10 common types of everyday life got into six months,” he added.
Production Details
Parallel to the interviews, the work presents several sequences of images that illustrate the subject being addressed, but without the reconstitution of the scene itself.
“Our biggest challenge was to make a series that anyone see, you don’t have to like football. In the first episode, we have almost 900 cutting points. The challenge was to take a linear story, a series of interviews that could be a podcast, and translate each of them creating rhythm and coherence between scenes.”
