The Australian NBA star’s brother who ended up playing professionally for FLAT Earth FC in Spain

For National Siblings Day, here’s a piece by Jarrod Kimber about the brother of an Australian basketball players interesting football career. You can find this in Issue 40

“What I’ve seen from within makes it clear: professional football is only money and corruption. It’s capitalism, and capitalism is death. I don’t want to be part of a system based on people earning money at the expense of the deaths of others in South America, Africa and Asia. To put it simply, my conscience will not let me continue with this.” Javi Poves, 2013

“If, to ascertain the true figure and condition of the earth, we adopt the ‘Zetetic’ process, which truly is the only one sufficiently reliable, we shall find that instead of its being a globe — one of an infinite number of worlds moving on axes and in an orbit around the sun, it is directly contrary — a Plane…” Samuel Birley Rowbotham (Earth Not a Globe, Parallax), 1881

“Zero penalties in our favour, robbed of three legally earned points, powerful people trying to break our club…” @FlatEarth_FC, 2020

This is about conspiracy theories. Two of them. One as big as the planet we’re on and another that only affected an NBA draft. There is an NBA player whose brother was just signed by a Spanish football club that promotes a conspiracy theory and a basketballer who once suffered at the hands of one.

Let’s start with the NBA player. In 2016, Thon Maker was arguably the hottest prospect in basketball. Maker is 7ft 1in and can move.

Thon had the romantic backstory. He was born in South Sudan in 1997, right in the middle of the civil war. Luckily his uncle got him into Uganda and from there he and his family received refugee status in Australia. He was playing football in Perth when a basketball scout noticed this athletic giant and said he should change sport. At 14 he went to Sydney to prepare to travel to the US. Once he arrived in the States he took over high-school basketball like few players ever have. Meaning that instead of going off to college to audition for an NBA job, he could skip it and go straight to the NBA. Only 45 players have ever gone from high school in the US and Canada to the NBA. On that list are Kobe Bryant and LeBron James.

Thon also has a brother, Maker Maker, who is a professional athlete. In fact, this is an extraordinary family. Their brother, Matur Maker, plays in the G league (the NBA’s second tier). Their cousin, Makur Maker, will probably be drafted into the NBA in 2021. Another cousin, Aliir Aliir, is an Australian Rules footballer for Port Adelaide. This is a family that produces athletes like few others.

Maker Maker is a couple of years younger than Thon, and at only (for basketball) 6ft 4in he continued to play football. At 21, Maker’s professional career has barely started. In October 2020 he signed his first pro contract in Europe, playing in division 3A in Spain.

The club that Maker Maker has just signed for used to be known as UD Móstoles Balompié and CDC Comercial. Now it is Flat Earth FC. An entire football club inspired by the theory that the Earth is not round, but flat. And what is weirder about all of this is that Thon’s career was almost derailed by another conspiracy theory.

On 1 July 2019, this was posted on the Flat Earth Society’s forum: “… the Flat Earth movement’s own football club is ready to kick off! The Spanish football team formerly known as Móstoles Balompié has been officially renamed to Flat Earth FC by its president, Javi Poves. Godspeed, FEFC. Your friends at the Flat Earth Society wish you nothing but success!”

It was then that a fourth-flight, family- run Spanish football club became a totem for conspiracy lovers. This was Poves’s statement: “We are born to unite the voices of millions of Flat Earth Movement followers and all those people who are looking for answers. Football is the most popular sport and has the most impact worldwide, so creating a club dedicated to the Flat Earth Movement is the best way to have a constant presence in the media. This will also be the first football club associated with a cause and an idea, without having a specific location. Professional football clubs are subject not only to a nation, but also to a city. Flat Earth FC is the first football club whose followers are united by the most important thing, which is an idea.”

Poves had been a decent footballer, playing as a defender at youth level for Atlético Madrid, before ending up at Sporting Gijón and making one senior appearance. Then he retired in 2011 when he was only 24. His retirement speech was epic and included the line “professional football is only money and corruption. It’s capitalism, and capitalism is death.”

Since changing the name of the club, Poves has tried hard to make clear this is not a marketing gimmick. He is a true believer and has old YouTube videos to back up his claims. This is a man who has said, to a camera, with a straight face, that he believes we are living in the matrix (probably the second film, the first one was way better than this reality).

But there is also clearly a marketing gimmick here, even if it’s also a cause Poves cares about. Poves has claimed Flat Earth is now one of the 10 most- supported Spanish clubs in the world.

Poves invited Vice to film the lead-up to their their first game, he got his players to change into their kit on the street and he gave away season tickets with a ‘made for social’ balloon-popping exercise. Before each match, one player shouts, “What is the Earth?” and the others respond, “Flat”. This is repeated a few times before Poves drops a blow-up globe into the middle of the huddle and then stabs it so it deflates.

For someone with no love of capitalism, he’s very good at it.

But when I went looking for the team’s sponsors, I couldn’t find any on their site. Where it would usually say sponsors, it said friends. And on that page were links to a bunch of conspiracy YouTube accounts, some with as few as 350 subscribers. In creating this new kind of football brand for his team, he’s changed how a football club works. His football club is now truly for the people, people who believe in a conspiracy theory that is crazy.

The only sponsor I could find was the shirt manufacturer, Macron. I asked them about providing shirts to a Flat-Earth team, and their spokesperson Giulia de Vito Piscicelli replied via email, “Our mission is to sell our product to all the sport societies without giving relevance to their personal beliefs,” and also a little more bizarrely, “We hope you will understand.” I don’t.

But there was one other thing that De Vito Piscicelli said in the email: “in any case the club you are talking about has already changed its name.”

I tried to follow up, but received no response. Flat Earth FC is still using this name on their shirts, website and social media. And why would they change it? They are making a new model of sporting team, one that can give them international attention and bring them new revenue streams that other Spanish third division football clubs could never dream of. Getting international attention, selling shirts to true believers and football hipsters around the world seems like a decent business model.

Maker Maker played his previous football in Melbourne. He was with Melbourne Victory Youth before being transferred to Port Melbourne Soccer Club Sharks at the start of 2019. I spoke to three football experts in Melbourne and while most of them had heard of him, only one could remember seeing him play. According to a Football Manager site I found, he is thought to have a good first touch, makes decent decisions, positions himself well, can jump very high and has solid stamina. The consensus from the football guys I spoke to was that he started, was a defensive midfielder or defender and wasn’t a standout player.

One of the few articles I could find on him, and to be fair he does not have a name suited to search engine optimisation, was from 1 July 2018 on Melbourne Victory’s website: “Maker, who turned 19 on Sunday, headed in an 85th-minute corner to see Victory return to winning ways with the success at Mahoneys Reserve.”

There really isn’t that much information on him. He’s on Instagram, but not that prolific. There are a few photos of him playing football, a few more with his (way) bigger brother and normal personal shots.

Then one post that has him receiving his shirt from Poves and signing his contract. He has written, “Pleased to announce I’ve signed a professional contract with Spanish Third division team @flatearthfc_ official for the 2020-21 season, would like to thank my family and friends for always supporting me and believing in me, this one is for you.”

How this footballer who used to play at my local ground ended up in the fourth flight of Spanish football with a science-denying football team is hard to say. (It should be said that the third tier of Spanish football is regionalised and comprises 100 clubs; this is not as high a level as the fourth tier in England would be.) Neither Maker nor the club returned my messages.

Near Barnard Castle. On the back of a road sign was graffiti that said “Flat Earth”. It was clear enough that Dominic Cummings could have read it.

You have probably always believed Earth to be round. Pythagoras and Aristotle both suggested over 2000 years ago the world was round and in 1522 the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan circumnavigated Earth neither hitting walls nor dropping off the surface.

If I was ever asked to think about it, I’d have to admit I don’t sail or practise science. But the sun looks round, so does the moon, and when I have looked through my son’s toy telescope at Mars and Venus, they look round too. For me, the world is round.

But I have also spent enough time online to know that there is an ever-growing number of people who don’t believe this.

Some people with no science background looked outside and decided the world was flat because they couldn’t see the curve. Often inspired by helpful YouTube videos and Facebook posts, they believe NASA is lying to us about Earth being round so they can use all that money to do other secret things. And before you say, what about the Russians, well they are in on it too, as the Antarctic Treaty System of 1959 proves. Antarctica hides these big ice walls, you see. And if that sounds weird, you need to know that many Flat Earthers do not believe in gravity, they think Earth is constantly moving upward. Some Flat Earthers also maintain that trees no longer exist, what we see are replicants (repliplants, I suppose).

If they believe the world is not flat, you would think it’s not that hard to find out. You’d just need a craft of some sort and then to go in one direction for a while. Or, in the case of ‘Mad Mike’ Hughes, you could crowd source to build a homemade rocket and fly to the Kármán line – 80km above sea level where space theoretically starts – and check for yourself. Sadly for Hughes his homemade rocket crashed and he died before making his final trip up to see if the world really is curved.

The first sport to have a draft was the NFL. The idea was to stop costs spiralling out of control and prevent the best teams from hoarding the young talent. The NBA draft started in 1947 and though it’s had some changes over the years, it remains a huge part of the league and the number one pick is a big deal.

At 16, people assumed Thon Maker would go at number one in the draft. It might seem ridiculous, because he had only dominated high-school students, which you expect a quick seven-foot- tall guy to do. Then to get in the NBA draft straight from high school, Thon had to call his final year at high school his postgraduate year. That allowed the NBA to make him the first teenager in 10 years to enter the NBA without a season of college, being an international or playing in a development league. The NBA did that because they thought they were getting something special.

It all started with the mix tapes. There’s an entire industry around basketballers getting known, some of which is playing basketball. A lot of it concerns whether they go viral. And this led to people uploading footage of Maker as a 16 year old playing high-school ball. One video is called “7’0 Thon Maker 16 Yr Old High School Phenom Official Sophomore Mixtape!” It has had 1.3 million views. There are many others with a lot of views. Maker had the height of an NBA centre, the tallest position in basketball, but the shooting, skill and speed of someone who could play a smaller position. Most seven footers don’t move. He moved.

Players with his height and speed are called unicorns in the NBA. It meant he was compared to two NBA legends, the Kevins, Durant and Garnett. Once you’re being compared to NBA champions and MVPs, people take notice.

The clips were mesmerising, but highlight reels only show how skilled or athletic you are; they don’t really show what you can do when playing basketball. And while at 16 Maker was the hottest thing on Earth, with his school-hopping and skipping of college, when he did play his limited game was easier to notice. Teams cooled on him and by the time the 2016-17 draft came along, instead of being an automatic number one pick, they thought him to be somewhere outside the top 10.

The draft was on 23 June 2016. That same day, a Reddit user posted a picture of Thon in his last year of Australian high school in Perth, five years before he was actually supposed to have finished high school. Meaning he was perhaps 23 and not 19.

This was a huge deal: at 19 with his skills, teams thought they could develop Thon into one of the best players in the NBA. If he was 23, he could get slightly better, but chances were he wouldn’t improve much. And there were only hours to go before the draft. Everyone was on Reddit, fans and probably general managers of NBA teams, trying to work out what was going on.

More photos of the Aranmore Catholic College annual were uploaded. A school with the motto “small enough to make a big difference”. We saw Thon posing for his end-of-year pic, with a pen in his mouth. Some thought parts looked photoshopped; now we had a reverse conspiracy. Then a video came out of someone flipping through the annual. Reddit users contacted the immigration office in Australia to see if there’s a way to change the date of birth on your passport.

Now there is timeline of Maker’s entire life on the page. There is a photo of Maker in a class environment and while he is the tallest in the class, he doesn’t look like a seven-foot kid. People are now checking the head shape of the photos. Others are looking at Facebook profiles of other kids in the yearbook and using their tweets as evidence. Oh, and there is another narrative that he had graduated from an English class for immigrant Australians. All this is still going when the Milwaukee Bucks draft Thon Maker at number 10 in the draft.

The conspiracy didn’t derail the fact he was over seven foot and could move. Milwaukee were collecting seven- footers with athleticism at that point; two years earlier, on a whim, they had drafted another unicorn, Giannis Antetokounmpo. Thon was one of them. Because of this pick, he probably went higher in the draft than most experts thought he was would. Luckily for him the conspiracy didn’t ruin what he could earn in his first three years.

Three days after the draft Maker’s childhood passport was released. It stated he was born in 1997, making him 19, and its issue date said 2009, before he was scouted to be a basketballer. And, as with Barack Obama, those who still believed in the conspiracy still believed.

As a child I would sit around with my mates and we’d talk about what would happen if we achieved our ultimate dreams of playing professional sport, but ended up with a team we hated. It didn’t matter the sport: do you just take the offer and go with it, or do you knock it back on principle? But what about if another country wanted you, would you be willing to change where you lived for your dream? Or what if you could play for your favourite team, in whatever position you wanted, in the biggest game, but across your shirt it said something horrific about your mother?

Obviously these were the conversations of stupid young boys. But as we got older, the hypotheticals got slightly more sophisticated. What if the club was sponsored by a company you hated, that gave orphans wedgies or bombed civilians? Or would you still represent your country if they were in the middle of a senseless war?

These conversations would go on for years. And yet, none of us came up with the hypothetical question Maker Maker and other Flat Earth FC players have been given. What if you are signed up to play professional football in Spain, but to do so you have to front a conspiracy theory that seems funny, but ultimately is probably making the world worse?

Make no mistake, there will be players who believe the Earth is flat. Some do already. The basketballers Kyrie Irving, Draymond Green and Shaquille O’Neal, all NBA champions and future hall-of- famers, have supported the Flat Earth theory. Sammy Watkins and Stefon Diggs from the NFL have supported it, as has the wrestler AJ Styles. And in the UK, the former England cricketer Andrew Flintoff has supported the conspiracy, but also believes that it may not be flat but perhaps turnip-shaped.

In football, Flat Earth FC have had support from Alfio ‘Coco’ Basile, who managed Argentina to their last two Copa América victories in 1991 and 1993. “Javi Poves, I congratulate you for your club Flat Earth,” he said. “I fully support your theory. I am one of your own.”

It’s perhaps not surprising that athletes would believe in conspiracy theories; they are believers by nature. They regularly do things that seem almost supernatural and beyond the laws of physics.

And it seems we have entered a huge moment of athlete empowerment. When it was tweeted that Paul Pogba had declared he wouldn’t play for France again because of Emmanuel Macron’s attempts to tackle radical Islam, people believed it. It wasn’t true, but we’re in a position now where it would make sense to us for a player like Pogba to make that kind of ideological stand. My old hypotheticals are back.

This has already happened, of course. And one of the best examples is Javi Poves himself. He didn’t just quit his club, but the entire industry because he disagreed with what the sport was doing. And when he changed the name of his football club, Copa90 reported that some players left because of it.

Believing the Earth is flat is a not a problem in itself. But it is a gateway conspiracy. It starts with someone thinking, “Wait, how does water curve?” (this is something Poves mentions) and next thing you’re convinced you don’t have to pay your taxes because of a meme on Tumblr.

But people don’t stop at one conspiracy. They end up overlapping with others. Places like YouTube, which is a key spreader of Flat Earth theory, have algorithms that pull you deeper into this conspiratorial video world. A few years back, if you were watching cat videos and you left YouTube on auto-play after a while, you would always end up with the “Gangnam Style” video. Then they changed it and instead you are promoted videos that are like the one you’ve watched, but even more niche. It means that if you go looking for a video on whether Flat Earth is correct, you’ll end up with darker videos being suggested.

While the Qanon conspiracy might feel like a bunch of boomers clicking on shit memes, it’s also had someone derail a freight train and underlay the assault on the Capitol in Washington. Pizzagate started as a joke on online message boards, and ended with a man in jail after he demanded to be shown the sex dungeons in the basement of the Comet Ping Pong Pizzeria in Washington. That pizza shop had no basement, but the man still shot three bullets into it. Another time the back of the restaurant was set on fire.

Most conspiracies start from a similar space. Many people do not trust those in power. That might be your elites, a new world order of global government or just the political party you don’t like. And it’s also nearly always the Jews (even when it’s giant lizards, it’s usually the Jews). Or whatever nationality, race or gender you don’t like.

This is about the Makers, right. So I told you before about the age conspiracy against Thon. What I didn’t tell you is he isn’t the first African-born NBA player to be subjected to this. Hakeem Olajuwon was a Dream Team member. People still claim he took five years off his age. Dikembe Mutombo was 16 years into his Hall of Fame career when he contacted the NBA commissioner to ask the commentators to stop making fun of his age. Manute Bol was another player whose teammates claimed he could have been as old as mid-50s when his NBA career ended. Bol played 600 NBA games and when he finished he played another year of pro basketball in Italy.

If he was 50 he was the world’s most athletic old man and should be given some kind of medal. Age fraud certainly exists in sport. But in the NBA it always seems to be attached to a Chinese or African player. Yet the only NBA player I could find who was found to have actually lied about his age this was Shabazz Muhammad, who was born in California.

In some ways Flat Earth FC seems like the funnier, easier-to-digest conspiracy of the two involving the Makers. But they all come from a dark place and generally end worse.

The Flat Earth theory might seem absurd, but it’s conspiracies such as this which lead people to become antivaxxers. And if we’re to have any kind of normal life in the next two years, as many people as possible need to be vaccinated.

Flat Earth FC’s Twitter page recently tweeted a picture of a dog wearing a muzzle. Translated from the original Spanish it read, “Introducing Jorge, he’s the same as 99% of Spanish people but he doesn’t wear his muzzle with pride. Poor Jorge.” They also have videos that suggest the testing for Covid is a money-making ploy. Suddenly this is a bit less amusing. This club has downplayed the pandemic and spread disinformation. They could be responsible for a loss of life.

The Flat Earth conspiracy began with Samuel Rowbotham, a Christian who grew up in the Fens on a utopian socialist commune. He went on the Bedford River, watched ships six miles away through a telescope and decided that as he could see the entire boat, the world must be flat. If it was round, he reasoned, then over six miles you should be able to spot the curve.

At the working-men’s newsroom in Blackburn, though, sailors suggested that they often could only see the tops of items that were far away. Rowbotham said he would come back two days later to explain this and never showed. A while later he was convinced by scientists to take part in an experiment to see if he could see all of Eddystone Lighthouse from Plymouth beach. He saw half the lantern and yet claimed this as a victory with such swagger than many locals thought he had been proved right.

Rowbotham would later publish the book Zetetic Astronomy: Earth Not A Globe under the name Parallax. He would falsely call himself a doctor, and he created a drink called Dr Shirley – which according to the Ardrossan Herald was a forerunner to Dr Pepper and Coke. The drink had medical properties: “A valuable brain tonic, and a cure for all nervous affections – sick headache, neuralgia, hysteria and melancholy.”

One reason Rowbotham was so hell- bent on proving the world was flat was to prove the Bible right – although Isaiah 40:22 says, “It is he who sits above the circle of the Earth…”. And then he realised he could profit out of this and ended up making a lot of money from giving lectures to people who believed, and also a lot who came to heckle and laugh at him.

The Flat Earth conspiracy started with a utopian Christian trying to prove the Bible correct with science and ended with him pretending to be a doctor and grifting money anyway he could. Now Flat Earth is being promoted by a former footballer who hates football and capitalism so much that he is happily running a club and selling as many shirts as he can with his novelty name.

The team mascot of Flat Earth FC is a full-kit astronaut who does keepie-ups in the middle of the pitch. From what I have seen, conspiracy theories are only money and corruption. It’s capitalism, and capitalism is death.

Jarrod Kimber is a writer and filmmaker who was a global writer with ESPN for ten years. He covers cricket mostly, but also other sports for talkSPORT. And hosts a number of podcasts and his own YouTube channel. @ajarrodkimber