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The draw for the 2014 FIFA World Cup takes place in Bahia in just over a week’s time. The tournament is the pinnacle of international football, but what kind of legacy will it leave for host nation Brazil?
There was widespread jubilation in October 2007, when Brazil was confirmed as host of the 20th football World Cup.
Rightly regarded as one of the spiritual homes of football, South America’s largest nation famously hosted the World Cup in 1950.
To say the tournament didn’t end well for the Brazilians is an understatement, as they succumbed 2-1 in the final to southern neighbours Uruguay in front of 200,000 disbelieving fans at Maracana.
It remains one of world football’s most enduring upsets and the loss plunged Brazil into a prolonged state of mourning.
Some 64 years later, Luiz Felipe Scolari’s team has the chance to avenge that famous defeat, but they’ll have to do so in an environment radically different from the football world of yesteryear.
Some 32 nations will convene next June – including newcomers Bosnia and Herzegovina – for a tournament set to take place across the length and breadth of South America’s largest nation.
The latter point makes the tournament an expensive proposition for fans, particularly as the bigwigs at FIFA have inconceivably failed to cluster the group stage geographically.
That means fans will need to arrange internal flights from cities like Curitiba to the virtually unheard of Cuiaba and back to Porto Alegre, purely for the privilege of watching their national team go around.
Even if the distances don’t prove unnerving, then the weather surely will – with June temperatures fluctuating at times by 30 degrees from the chilly lows of Porto Alegre in the deep south, to the Amazonian humidity of Manaus and the dry coastal heat of the north-east.
In other words, this tournament could be a hard slog for fans hoping to experience the essence of what makes Brazil’s football culture so unique.
Quite rightly, tens of thousands of tickets have been set aside for locals, ensuring plenty of Brazilians – or at least those in the middle-class – will enjoy the benefits of hosting a World Cup on home soil.
But as the at-times violent protests at this year’s Confederations Cup demonstrated, a vast section of Brazilian society is angry at the huge sums being spent to finance the tournament in a nation lacking basic infrastructure in some of its largest cities.
One of the most problematic issues is the sheer amount of new stadia the Brazilian government is building, and the tragic death of two construction workers after a roof collapsed at Arena Corinthians yesterday will have done nothing to boost morale.
The vast oversupply of grounds can be attributed to Brazil’s powerful state football federations, which have long controlled the game in a country boasting only a handful of distinct economic bases across the nation.
How is it possibly a good thing that the brand new Arena Pantanal will host the grand sum of four group stage games, when Cuiaba’s two professional clubs are nowhere near Brazil’s top flight?
How is it a good thing to leave a legacy of no less than seven new stadia boasting a capacity in excess of 50,000 seats, when average attendances in Brazil’s Serie A rarely exceed 25,000 at any club?
When FIFA talks about “for the good of the game,” are they referring to the game in Brazil?
Because it seems clear even when the cost of expensive new stadia don’t price Brazil’s lowest income earners out of the domestic competition after the World Cup, those fans who do continue to show up will be left to rattle around in half-empty home grounds.
That seems to be the price of hosting a World Cup these days.
It’s a tournament which means many things to many people, but increasingly those people don’t appear to be football fans.