Soccer
Brazil wins the cup
Oct 31st 2007 | SAO PAULO
From Economist.com
It will host the 2014 World Cup
FOR Brazil, a country with a seemingly endless supply of football players with magnetic feet, winning the football World Cup is usually a fairly straightforward business. Hosting the event, which comes round every four years, it is likely to prove much harder. On Tuesday October 30th FIFA, the world soccer’s governing body, confirmed that the competition will take place in Brazil in 2014.
This victory gives the country a chance to get even with the other rapidly developing BRIC countries (Russia, India and China) on one score. China will host the Olympics next year; India has the Commonwealth Games in 2010; the Winter Olympics will go to Russia in 2014. For any big, fast-growing economy with lousy infrastructure and a sprinkling of political corruption, it seems that hosting a big sporting event is a must these days.
Compared with the other countries competing in this informal BRIC competition, Brazil has a head start. It was the only country bidding for the World Cup in 2014. The host nation is chosen from a different continent each time, though FIFA recently said that it would abandon the system, and no other country in the region fancied taking on the challenge.
Football-mad Brazil has other advantages too. It already has lots of stadiums and so it should not have to build many more. They are too small and too crumbly at the moment, but they could be repaired and enlarged in time for the big event. China, by contrast, has a dozen sports centres, an underground railway and an airport terminal to complete before the Olympics start next year.
Brazil’s problem lies instead with the challenge of getting a few hundred thousand foreign tourists to the matches in time for the kick-off. As in India, the other big, functioning democracy in this particular competition, any big public project in Brazil with an inflexible deadline provides opportunities for expensive pork-barrel politics for a legislature that can make high drama out of even routine spending bills. Funding Russia’s Winter Olympics (which has its own problems: for a start, Sochi, the host city, is a seaside resort) will be straightforward by comparison.
As if to illustrate what lies ahead, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s entourage in Zurich, where FIFA made the announcement, included a smattering of ministers and no fewer than 12 state governors. They will all demand that a share of the spending comes their way. The government’s allies in Congress and the Senate will make sure that their pet projects see some cash too. Contracts for big building projects in Brazil have been an invitation to collect kickbacks in the past. And Brazilian football has its own problems with money scandals. Federal prosecutors are currently hovering over Corinthians, one of São Paulo’s biggest clubs, and want to speak to Boris Berezovsky, a Russian oligarch based in London, about whether the club was used to launder money.
Total pessimism is unwarranted, though. The country’s confidence is so high at the moment that it will make a success of the tournament somehow, even if the pre-tournament antics off the pitch are not very pretty to watch. The football, on the other hand, should be. In its last outing, Brazil’s national team thrashed Ecuador’s in the Maracaña stadium in Rio de Janeiro. After scoring four elegant goals, Brazil’s players reacted to a fifth with a shrug. Why? The players apparently reckoned it was too ugly to celebrate.
