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04/15/2006:
"Over the Moon: how football wins recruits for sect leader in Brazil"
Unification Church's critics say sports projects are used to brainwash impoverished young peoplet's training time on a drizzly morning in the impoverished Brazilian suburb of Los Angeles and 18 footballers huddle in circles, exchanging passes, headers and a sporadic barrage of expletives.
For residents of this impoverished area near Campo Grande, where boggy tracks wind between wooden shacks and cows amble from street to street, it's an ordinary Wednesday morning.
But this is no ordinary Brazilian football team. Nor is the team's owner - the eccentric 86-year-old leader of the Unification Church, Reverend Sun Myung Moon - your run-of-the-mill chairman.
Part of a miniature football empire commanded by evangelism's answer to Roman Abramovich, the New Hope Sports Centre (CENE) represents, say its directors, an attempt to transform Brazil's increasingly decadent national game as well as a step along the road to world peace.
"Our plans were always that within 10 years we'd be in the top flight," says Jose Rodrigues, the club's marketing director, at CENE's training centre in Los Angeles. "That means 2009 - so we have three years to really show what we can do."
For Moon's many critics, the team is nothing more than a bait used to draw locals into his controversial sect, offering access to education and sports to convert people from vulnerable, deprived communities.
CENE is one of two Moon-backed teams (the other is in Sao Paulo) that form the sports wing of a South American Moonie kingdom, now made up of around 200,000 hectares (500,000 acres) of farmland in Brazil, bought for an estimated $25m (£14m), and at least 600,000 hectares (1.5m acres) in neighbouring Paraguay.
Followers say that through this transnational corridor Moon hopes to project his ideas across the continent. "In truth, football has the power to do something which nothing else can do - create one, single belief," says Paulo Telles, the club's executive president and a member of Moon's Family Association in Brazil.
Moon's Brazilian odyssey is said to have begun in 1994 during a fishing trip to the Pantanal, one of the world's largest wetlands, in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul. Astonished by the area's wildlife, he returned to begin constructing the estate which now straddles Brazil's border with Paraguay.
The centrepiece of this ever-growing empire is the New Hope ranch, near the small town of Jardim. Here the Moonies receive followers from around the world, for visits of up to 40 days. Twelve neatly organised brick bungalows sit next to the Moonie church, a huge terracotta mansion, with the group's logo sprouting from its roof. Foreign visitors cruise around the community in white VW vans, and during the week the area's state school fills with children from nearby towns.
guardian.co.uk
