crumbling house with the leaky roof, across a new highway from a new World Cup stadium, Maria Ivanilde Oliveira heard everything. Notes of the national anthems floated through the humid air into her living room, where her black vinyl couch was losing its stuffing and a metal bookshelf was secured by gnarly wire. A mix of loud cheers and moans from 40,000 soccer fans told her that a team had scored. With no job and little money, Oliveira, 62, could not afford a ticket to see one of the four games played at the $450 million Arena das Dunas, one of 12 stadiums hosting the World Cup in Brazil. To squeeze out a living, Oliveira usually sells ice out of her house, mostly to beachgoers headed to the town’s popular waterfront. But construction of the highway to accommodate the World Cup games stopped her ice deliveries about four months ago. The 420-page stadium manual published by FIFA, soccer’s world governing body, says that a new arena “provides many benefits for the local community” and enhances community pride. It says many new stadiums have gymnasiums, shops and other perks for residents. FIFA does not demand that World Cup host countries build stadiums, but just in case, it describes how they should be constructed, including the location of pipes for field drainage and requirements like telephones with recording capability in more than a dozen places, such as FIFA offices. Oliveira is proof that a new stadium doesn’t necessarily improve the lives of its neighbors. Bare wires hung from her ceilings where light fixtures used to be. Surrounded by walls with cracks big enough to slip her hand into, Oliveira was left to listen to the soccer soundtrack, sometimes by candlelight. “I haven’t had electricity for a year and a half now because it’s too expensive,” she said through an interpreter as pails dotting her floor collected water dripping from her ceiling and attracted mosquitoes. “That’s not the World Cup’s fault; it’s our politicians’ fault,” she said. “But I can say that the money spent on the Cup, well, it could have been spent on better things.” She was right. The seven cities that built stadiums for this World Cup and the five cities that renovated existing ones spent billions that could have improved the lives of people like Oliveira, who has high blood pressure and struggles to afford her medicine. Some of the money could have helped her 20-year-old son, Luiz André Louseiro, who had problems finding a job after high school. For years, protesters have reminded the Brazilian government that hosting the world’s biggest soccer tournament is the world’s worst idea for their country. They have marched all over criticizing waste and cost overruns on projects for the World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics, which will be based in Rio de Janeiro. If FIFA officials heard about those protests, it’s unclear whether they cared. Like International Olympic Committee executives, they seem to choose host cities while wearing blinders. When Brazil proposed to FIFA that it would build an array of shrines for soccer, the national sport, it most likely sounded like a great idea. What better place for the World Cup than Brazil, where soccer is sacred? The game is played on beaches, with coconuts marking the goals. Youngsters in favelas write their players’ favorite numbers on their bare backs because they don’t have money to buy jerseys. The fans would come, the television shots would be breathtaking. Neither FIFA nor Brazil learned from the past. So many cities regret playing host to huge sporting events. Athens, for one, fell into debt after hosting the 2004 Olympics. Most of its once-sparkling athletic venues, including an arena just for taekwondo, are used sparingly at best and stand as reminders that holding the Summer Games in their birthplace sounded wonderful but wasn’t at all practical. “What are we going to use this stadium for after the World Cup?” Marília Sueli Ferreira, who works at a stationery store in view of the Natal stadium, asked through an interpreter. “The World Cup is made for tourists, not for residents, and the tourists are going to disappear very soon.” The tourists started leaving Natal after the last game here, on Tuesday. The stadium will not regularly host tens of thousands of fans. This city of fewer than a million people in northeastern Brazil does not have a top-level soccer team, and its lower-level teams attract several thousand fans only on their biggest game days. Without a guaranteed tenant, the stadium has a murky future. But it has company. The stadiums in Manaus, surrounded by rain forest; Cuiabá, the soybean capital of Brazil, near Bolivia; and Brasília, the capital, are also expected to become World Cup white elephants because none of them have soccer teams that can consistently fill them. The four stadiums cost about $2 billion, most of it public money. (The human toll was also great, as nine workers died during the construction in Brazil.) History has hinted that the fate of those stadiums will be dire. Last fall, I paid about $4 to tour Cape Town Stadium, which was built for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa but had turned into a cavernous ghost town. Maybe 100 people a week buy tickets to get a close look at the Cup-generated waste. The space can be rented for weddings or other events, like the small fashion show that I saw there. Suites that once held World Cup parties were dusty and silent. The state-of-the-art locker rooms, with tiny safes at each stall and rows of sinks to wash dirt off cleats, remained untouched. Thousands of tiny lights glistened from the ceiling of a V.I.P. entrance. The 55,000 seats remain empty most of the time, except when a handful are filled for games of a local soccer team, or when fans pack it for an occasional concert, as they did to see Justin Bieber. The playing surface is pristine and green. South Africa’s initial bid placed Cape Town’s stadium in a historically poor section of town, but FIFA expressed concern about what television viewers would think when they saw “shacks and poverty.” It persuaded the city to build a cutting-edge stadium on the waterfront instead. The local government expected a popular local rugby team to move in after the World Cup, but that team balked because the rent was too high. It looks as if some towns in Brazil will be faced with the same problem. Here’s what those towns are about to learn: It’s expensive to maintain a huge stadium and nearly impossible to do so, even in a city as big as Cape Town, if a major team doesn’t call that stadium home. That cities are left with that quandary is partly FIFA’s fault. As the worldwide soccer ambassador, FIFA should discourage host countries from constructing permanent stadiums and encourage them to build temporary ones or rely on existing buildings. The I.O.C. should do that, too. But these countries and governing bodies never learn. Maybe an entire section of FIFA’s 420-page stadium manual needs to cover the downsides of building a stadium without a long-term plan to use it. One section would describe how some Cape Town residents are so upset by the World Cup extravagance that they have called for their sparkling, state-of-art stadium to be razed to make room for affordable housing. In Natal, some residents are expressing their displeasure through graffiti. The side of one building reads: “We want FIFA-standard jobs. We want FIFA-standard education and health care.” FIFA doesn’t publish a thick manual for that. It has the money to, though. According to Forbes, the governing body will generate $4 billion in revenue from this World Cup, with a $2 billion profit. Oliveira said she would love to see some of that money benefit the residents of host cities. But for now, she’s just wondering how to pay for her next doctor visit. Lately, she has been feeling weak. That worries Louseiro, her son, who lives with her. Sometimes she can’t breathe well or stand up, he said. She has been told she needs surgery to clean out an artery, but the family cannot afford it now. Even when the family can pay, health care leaves a lot to be desired. One hospital visit yielded an appointment with an orthopedic surgeon, family members said, but Oliveira needed a doctor to examine her heart. Another time, an ambulance dispatcher told her to take a cab to the hospital. “This is not about soccer,” Louseiro said. “It’s about politicians needing to use public funds to help people who need it. But we know how things work. The politicians, they rob us, they take our money, and nothing changes for us. The World Cup didn’t make anything better, and it didn’t make anything worse. It just pointed out our problems to the world.” But the World Cup did help Oliveira’s family, at least temporarily. An influx of construction workers to the city — for projects including the Ibis hotel next to the stadium and the pedestrian overpasses that lead to the stadium — provided jobs for residents. (The hotel is still a skeleton of concrete, and one of Oliveira’s neighbors pointed out a huge gap in a walkway, saying: “Look, take a picture of that. It’s going to fall down.”) Louseiro was so desperate for work that he took a job serving food to the workers. He earns about $450 a month to support himself and his mother. He brings home food, but only enough to eat right away because they have no refrigeration. He is saving for his mother’s surgery. What will happen when the construction surrounding the now-empty stadium ends and his job disappears? He doesn’t know. “No one will pay any attention to us anymore,” he said. “Just like always.” The same fate awaits other places with new stadiums, in Brazil and in other countries. Next up is Russia, host of the 2018 World Cup. It plans to spread the tournament among nearly a dozen cities. Here’s no surprise: Most will have new stadiums. Let’s see how that works out. Email: juliet@nytimes Sergio Peçanha contributed reporting.
Posted on: Sun, 29 Jun 2014 16:52:33 +0000
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