If playing football, earning a nice wage and being funded by the taxpayer sounds up your street, you might want to give former Wolverhampton Wanderers man Bruno Jordão a call.
That’s at least according to Gazeta Wyborcza, who cover the player today and his role in a ‘scam that never ends’ at Polish club Radomiak.
The newspaper explains that Jordão is the current beneficiary of a scholarship from the city of Radom, which is awarded to “individuals achieving high sports results in international or domestic sports competitions.”
This award, around PLN 20,000 per month, or PLN 320,000 by June 2025, is something that he’s been earning since joining the club from Wolves on a free transfer in February last year.
Except, at least according to Gazeta, it all appears to be a bit of a scam. They say that only in Poland could Jordão be considered an ‘above average athlete’ and achieve success.
They argue that before then his career was average, ‘actually sad’, with failed spells at Wolves, alongside a non-descript time in his native Portugal and a spell at Lazio in which he didn’t even fit in the reserve team.
He has quite literally ‘failed everywhere’ they say but now appears to be considered a star in Poland and worthy of a public stipend from the city of Radom.
This support is financed by the taxpayer, and is four times higher than the earnings of half of the Polish population and that doesn’t even include the salary he’s already paid by the club.
Yet, the success of it is for is debatable given Radomiak finished 15th in the league last season, the lowest place guaranteeing survival, avoiding the drop by a point, and are in a similar position this year.
He is quite literally considered one of the ‘heroes for a quarter-time job’ by the newspaper, who believe he and another 173 athletes across various sports may be taking advantage. Of these, the footballers, including the former Wolves man, are being treated the ‘most generously’ for doing very little.
Jordão is not the only one, by any means, and there are plenty of offenders in what appears to be a Polish scandal that would have some British politicians who lined their pockets during COVID blushing.
