Brazil: When protests threaten football

It used to be said that hosting the football World Cup or the Olympics was the coming out party of the host. Its prestige went up and investments boosted the economy.


Well, it also used to be said that Brazil played happy football, in keeping with the happy, carefree people who danced the samba as their team clobbered the opposition wearing that startling yellow-and-blue uniform.

Today, Brazil is hosting the Confederations Cup, a dress rehearsal for the World Cup due 12 months later. And, from São Paulo to Belo Horizonte to Fortaleza, millions of people, presumably football-loving Brazilians, are out on the streets in protest against a government perceived as reckless and corrupt. It wasn’t always so.

A few years ago, President Lula was Brazil’s hero. When he announced that Brazil had won the right to host the Olympics in 2016, the crowds erupted at Copacabana.

But his chosen successor Dilma Rousseff hasn’t been as lucky. The economy has slowed. Graft is rampant. More and more Brazilians now question the idea of spending a staggering $13.3 billion on hosting the World Cup, when the money could have gone for other, probably more necessary things, than football.

Fifa is now probably glad that the next hosts will be Russia and Qatar, less democratic than Brazil, where a favourite T-shirt reads, “Fick Fufa”.