Carlos Coreira, a Mumbai native who has lived in the U.S. since the early 1970s, has been elected as the new president of the United States Soccer Federation. The 62-year-old son of a Goan father and Colombian mother moved with his widowed mother and three siblings when he was 15 years old in 1971.
Cordeiro said in reports that he has “football blood” in his veins for as long as he can remember. “With a Colombian mother and a Goan father, nothing less is expected,” the former Goldman Sachs executive told Times of India. Cordeiro will be tasked with righting the ship of a U.S. Soccer program that saw its men’s national team fail to qualify for the FIFA World Cup for the first time since 1986.
Cordeiro, 61, will serve a four-year term, after a 30-year career in international finance. According to a U.S. Soccer Federation press release, Cordeiro was born to a Colombian mother and a Portuguese father in 1956.
He immigrated to the United States from India with his widowed mother and three siblings at the age of 15 and became an American citizen 10 years later. He is a graduate of Miami Beach High School, Harvard College and Harvard Business School.
A dedicated philanthropist, Cordeiro became a partner at Goldman Sachs in the early 1990s and was later appointed vice chairman-Asia. He advised governments such as Nelson Mandela’s post-apartheid South Africa, global corporations, and financial institutions including the World Bank.
Now retired, he continues to serve as an honorary unpaid advisor to the firm.From 2005 to 2015, he also served as an independent director of BHP Billiton, the world’s largest natural resources company, where he focused on governance, finance and risk management. He first joined the U.S. Soccer Federation in 2007.
“Thank you to those of you who have supported me today,” Cordeiro said in a statement. “This is incredibly humbling. … To those of you who didn’t vote for me, I’m going to work to earn your support and trust over the next four years. I promise I will work for all of you to bring us together as one soccer community.”