The Man In Charge Who Heads The Brazilian Football Federation

Understanding Leadership at Brazil's Football Governing Body

The person running the CBF right now is Ednaldo Rodrigues, commonly known as Roxo. He took over after the previous leadership was suspended, and his tenure has been a mixture of continuity efforts and structural changes that most people outside of Brazilian football administration don't notice until something goes wrong. I've spent more years than I care to count dealing with the CBF's administrative machinery, so here is what you actually need to know. Roxo became the president of the Confederação Brasileira de Futebol in March 2022. Before that he was a member of the board and had been working within the federation's structure for years. The CBF itself controls everything from the national team setup to the organization of Série A and Série B, plus the CBF Cup and the Campeonato Brasileiro rankings. It is a massive apparatus with roughly 21 state federations under it, each with their own politics. One thing beginners miss is that the CBF president does not have unilateral power over everything you assume. The state federations hold significant autonomy, especially regarding their own championships and refereeing appointments. When Roxo came in, one of his first moves was trying to standardize referee assignment protocols across all states. Most people thought that would be straightforward. It was not.

I worked on a project back in 2023 where we needed official CBF documentation to verify a club's eligibility for a national competition. The process should have taken two days. It took eleven. The problem was that the CBF had recently changed its digital platform for document submission, and the old workflow documentation was still floating around on several third-party sports law sites. The workaround was straightforward once I figured it out: go directly to the CAGED section of the CBF's own portal and bypass the intermediary certification pages entirely. Those intermediary pages were still generating PDFs with outdated reference numbers that the new system rejected. Going direct cut the delay from weeks to a single business day. There are structural issues with how the CBF operates that are worth understanding if you deal with them regularly. The federation's budget allocation for state-level development programs is often delayed by months. This creates a ripple effect where clubs in smaller states struggle to plan youth academy investments because they cannot rely on the promised funding arriving on schedule. It is not a conspiracy. It is a cash flow problem combined with a governance structure that requires multiple approval layers for any disbursement over a certain threshold. The international side is another layer. Brazil is a FIFA member through the CBF, but CONMEBOL handles continental competitions. The CBF president negotiates Brazil's position in CONMEBOL matters, but the actual match scheduling, disciplinary cases, and competition formats are decided at the continental level. Roxo has been active in CONMEBOL councils, which matters for things like World Cup qualifying schedules and how many Libertadores spots each country gets.

Another thing nobody talks about much is the referee development pipeline. The CBF runs its own referee certification courses, and the quality variance between states is significant. In São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro the infrastructure is decent. In the Northeast and North regions, certified referees are scarce, which means matches sometimes have to import officials from other regions at considerable cost. This is a persistent operational headache that affects lower-division games most severely. If you are looking into the CBF presidency for research or professional reasons, the official website is cbf.com.br. The contact and institutional pages there are the only reliable sources. A lot of articles about Brazilian football leadership get details wrong because they confuse theCBF president with the technical delegate or the selection committee head. Those are separate roles with separate responsibilities. The current administration has focused on stabilizing finances after years of legal challenges that affected previous leadership terms. That stabilization work is mostly invisible to fans. You notice it when payment schedules for tournaments stop getting delayed and when youth development grants actually arrive on time. Whether Roxo will stay beyond his current term depends on the internal election cycle and the political balancing act required between the state federations, which is standard CBF dynamics.

For anyone actually working with the federation, the most practical advice is to stop relying on older procedural guides and verify every workflow against the current CBF portal. The system has changed enough in the last few years that half the information online is stale. The direct approach I mentioned above applies to most interactions: find the official CBF channel and skip the intermediaries. It saves time and prevents errors from outdated reference systems.