Evo Morales, a keen amateur football player, is turning professional. The Bolivian president has agreed minimum wage terms with Sport Boys Warnes, a small team from the provincial city of Santa Cruz. Apparently Mr Morales will be playing just 20 minutes when he does get a game, but then he is 54.
His age is actually the most surprising thing about the story, for Mr Morales is hardly the first Latin American president to mix politics with football. In the 1970s Brazil’s General Emilion Medici sought to pick the national team. As first lady, Argentina’s Eva Perón was known to kick off a game in her heels.
Latin America is not alone when it comes to combining populist politics and football. Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s leading political player of the past two decades, named his party after a football chant and owned AC Milan. Thaksin Shinawatra, deposed Thai prime minister, chose to grandstand back home by buying Manchester City. Yet nowhere else is the combination so pervasive.