Kaiser!: The Greatest Footballer Never to Play Football

Amazing story about Kaiser. Its hard to believe for many reasons but I believe the author--but not the subject. Worth reading.

Loved the film, really interesting story. Love seeing these untold docs on Prime!

It is a great documentary about an absolute legend. Great storytelling

A terrific story told by a master storyteller. Fast-paced, funny, poignant - Rob Smyth is the Wodehouse de nos jours.

This book has all the potential to be a very entertaining and insightful story about one of football's more unique characters. Unfortunately, after the novelty of learning about this journeyman non-footballer who is good with women, the book just becomes repetitive and reads as though the author is in the pub bragging to his mates about this "Legend" called Kaiser that he's just met and who is in awe with how good with women he is. The flow of "Kaiser chatted up this woman", "Kaiser could get any girls number", "Ah yeah, Kaiser is a hero, this one time he went up to a girl in the shopping mall and got her number" gets quite boring.The more potentially interesting parts of this character are covered briefly at best. A full three pages of a chapter are dedicated to Kaiser actually falling in love and meeting the woman of his dreams only for it to end tragically. Moreover, given the difficult start to life that Kaiser had, his early years are skipped over far too quickly. A character bio like this should really dig deeper into what makes him tick rather than focussing on the superficial character traits he embodies which, although mildly entertaining, gets old quickly and becomes very samey.The book ends up going round in circles with repetitive stories of Kaiser's charm with the fairer sex and how he got into restaurants for free, with random snippets about the history of Brazilian football and some of the other footballers mentioned, until we get to where Kaiser is now in life. As I've repeated throughout (the irony), a mildy entertaining and easy read but can't help but feel that it's a wasted opportunity to write a great biography about a unique character in football.

Having heard about Carlos before the book was published I was intrigued to read it and it absolutely didn’t disappoint. It was very well written with great pace and obvious in-depth knowledge of football. As someone who doesn’t know one end of the offside rule from the other I’d say don’t be put off by the fact it’s about football: just read and marvel at the chutzpah of Carlos!

Bought this on the back of the Totally Football push.Slightly disappointed by this book. I just can't get past the writing style: "Kaiser then did this...", "Kaiser then went here....", "Kaiser then said that ...", "... that wasn't good enough for Kaiser". Seems like the whole thing is on repeat without ever really getting anywhere and you're left clinging on to the star name references to get you through. Perhaps I'm just miserable.

Worth reading just for the laugh. How did he get away with everything???I skipped quite a lot as I really am not a football fan. Have given the book to a friend who is a fan and looking forward to reading it

A really good read. Massively insightful, not just into Kaiser, bit also how parts of Brazilian football were back in the 80s.