World Cup 2014!

[Pulsar_t]

[Sload Soap]

I hope the protests against the world cup make people consider if FIFA is worthy of being the overseeing force behind the world's most popular sport. When you add up the obvious corruption behind the Qatar bid, the fact that the next world cup is going to be in an increasingly hostile Russia and their unwritten rubric of siding with the best presented bid, not the most workable, I think it's time they hang up their boots.

My personal opinion of this world cup is that when Brazil won the world cup they were in a position to afford it, but since the crisis of 2008 things have changed. I am behind the people of Brazil of course. I was disgusted by the BBC's coverage of the Confederations Cup last year and how they tried to gloss over the protests going on. Wage disparity is one of my pet peeves and something I genuinely think is destroying lives across the globe. Football itself is an obvious example of lopsided wage gaps.

However, I also feel some have taken the unrest and churlishly used it to poke holes in the sport itself out of personal dislike. Brazil is exactly the place to host a World Cup. It's the spiritual home of the sport and they are the most crowned champions. If we only hosted sporting events in nice safe stable countries every Olympics and World Cup from now until the end of time would be played in New Zealand. And no one wants that. Brazilian's haven't stopped loving football but they have put their foot down to FIFA. There's a difference.

[ZeroAX]

I think Brazilians just put their foot down against their own government. What they want is hospitals, schools and good roads. Not huge stadiums. And if the World Cup isn't bad enough, next year they are hosting the Olympics. That's way too much for ANY country, let alone a developing one.

I don't know about FIFA but at least the IOC learned its lesson and gave the Olympics to Tokyo instead of Istanbul

[Sload Soap]

I agree, but Brazil is also the 7th largest economy in the world. A growing economy yes but they should be able to afford the hospitals and the stadia.

[ZeroAX]

I agree, but Brazil is also the 7th largest economy in the world. A growing economy yes but they should be able to afford the hospitals and the stadia.

. Take it from Greece, when there's so much corruption you can afford everything and nothing at the same time .

This reminded me of South Africa where they built a football stadium in a city which had less inhabitants than the stadium's capacity....wasted money much?

The only developing country that organized one of these well was China.

[Sload Soap]

Yeah, that is true. We had the last Olympics at the same time we had massive cuts to local government funding and massive job losses in the civil service.

I've been looking for any information as to why so many new stadia had to be built. My hunch was it's a safety/capacity thing but I can't find any evidence for that. I was watching video of the 1966 world cup and the games are just held in the stadiums as they were. I would have thought Brazil would have the stadium bit covered, much better than South Africa or Japan/Korea. But they have still built expensive new venues in places that don't have a decent sized club team. It's confusing and my mind leads to cynical conclusions.

I did find this interesting article though, so it wasn't an afternoon wasted.

[ZeroAX]

Basically FIBA and IOC reward countries willing to spend a lot of money on the event. It creates a construction boom (and god knows how many handshakes under the table are given over stadium construction contracts) and the organizations reward bids willing to spend the most money.

Case in point the 2020 Olympics. Madrid had most of the infrastructure needed already built but it got way less votes than Istanbul, which had not only spent a summer bashing the skull of anyone who dared to look at the sultan in the wrong way, but also (as was seen the past december with the corruption leaks) a very corrupt political class which has profited massively from an uncontrolled construction boom.

At least Japan won out in the end, and after the 2011 tsunami they probably needed it more too.

[jfrost]

[Sload Soap]

That's where my thoughts were leading unfortunately. Back handers make the world of business go round especially in developing nations. The infrastructure thing also feeds back into the protests in Brazil: they were told that the roads and rails would be improved to support the influx of people during the world cup. That doesn't seem to have happened.

This also relates to why we in England were so peeved to have lost the 2018 vote. We have the stadia, we have probably more experience of policing football games than anyone, we have good public transport links and so on. But FIFA doesn't want that because where's the profit? Much better for them Russia builds five new stadiums and lines their pockets. And Qatar? There should be a rule that if you've never qualified for a World Cup you can't host one. That'd end that.

[jfrost]

I have written about the World Cup and protests, past and future. If anyone cares:

World Cup for Whom? - http://c4ss.org/content/27402
Brazil is Going to Burn, Again - http://c4ss.org/content/25425

Elsewhere, I've also written about how I think most people feel about the upcoming tournament:

This year's World Cup is going to be (or rather, it's already being) so awkward for Brazilians.

Unlike other nations, Brazil does not have a founding myths. Brazil didn't fight any wars. Actually, it did fight the Paraguayan War, and it's something Brazilians have long regretted deeply (a lot of the time for the wrong reasons; Marxist historians tended to say that Paraguay was some sort of proto-socialist quasi-utopia). Until the 1890s, Brazil was a formal imperial monarchy, governed by a Portuguese royal family.

Romantic writers in the mid-1800s and Modernist writers in the 1920s tried incessantly to find what would be a "national soul." Sociologists such as Sérgio Buarque de Hollanda and Gilberto Freyre have long been obsessed about it. But Brazil, the nation, is a 20th century construct. It was created by Getúlio Vargas's dictatorship, which established most national traits. Rio de Janeiro's samba and the military parade-style Carnaval were promoted as national symbols.

And then there was soccer, which had become, in the 1920s, the most popular sport in the country. The cultural bonds that we have are: we speak the same language (different from the rest of Latin America) and we like soccer. That's pretty much it.

Soccer is where Brazil is the protagonist a lot of people think it should be, but isn't. Like it's such a wasted potential. At least there's this one thing we do and we do right.

It's actually a bit scary how people still remember the 1950 World Cup, when Brazil lost the finals to Uruguay. Barbosa, the goalie in the finals, was reviled until the end of his life.

From what I've read, the 1950 World Cup was a huge wake-up call. The failure was attributed to outdated tactics and personal weakness, and the team started preparing to be able to win again. And Brazil has won the World Cup 5 times since 1950. We treat it like it's a huge fucking middle finger to Europe and the rest of the world, we can beat you at your game.

Last year I went to the streets to protest during the Confederations Cup (a pre-World Cup tournament), I was chased off by the police, I was really fucking angry. But then I went ahead and watched the finals between Brazil and Spain, that was being billed as the best in history against the best nowadays.

Brazil stomped Spain 3-0 and it was so damn satisfying. I was cheering for the goals and for the protesters battling the police outside the stadium in Rio.

It felt like we were wasting our potential again in preparations for this event, but more than anything, I could see my friends, who were really sympathetic to protesters, they really wanted the team to win too. Because it wasn't only the game, it's like Brazil was being counted out yet again. So the team and the protesters stood for the same thing: Brazil not being ruled out. I could understand it.

Then, the Cup is a week away and Brazil is getting angrier. Nothing is going according to schedule, everyone has been robbed, people have been thrown out of their houses, the police is arresting protesters left and right. And that's why Brazilians really want to win.