Problems Continue

Problems continue in Brazil's mega-event world.

Stadia: Yesterday’s edition of Veja, a conservative news weekly, had as its cover a photo of the Maracanã  with the headline – "At the current pace, the Maracanã  will reopen 24 years late". The story behind the front page was not encouraging. None of the 12 Brazilian stadium projects underway are at the same stage of development as were the stadiums in South Africa. Not that it matters. According to Peter Alegi, a top SA 2010 researcher, only one of the ten 2010 WC stadiums is currently in use and the 50,000 capacity Royal Bafokeng Sports Palace drew an impressive 655 fans for a recent league match.

Corruption: The delays and confusion and lack-of-planning and stupidity and incompetence and outright theft and lack of professionalism in the planning for the 2014 World Cup has now been called out by Brazil’s biggest media outlets. This very same media have had their hands forced into a critical posture but never take the next step to calling for a total reorganization of Brazilian football. The CBF is one of the most corrupt and closed institutions in the world. It’s president Ricardo Teixeira was named as one of the greedy gophers selling his votes to Qatar. His father-in-law, João Havelange was also named in the recent corruption scandal.

Transportation: The transportation lines being crammed through Brazilian cities to attend to the short-term demands of mega-events will dislocate millions of people without attending to the real demands of Brazilian metropolitan areas.  The lack of planning in transportation was reported by Agencia Brasil the other day and comes as no surprise. In the above mentioned Veja article, one of the highlights was that the Brazilian government has already declared that 9 of the 12 airport projects will not be ready for the World Cup or Olympics. The Rio Metro saga is playing out poorly as no one can figure out where the new line 4 is going to go.

Forced Evicitions: Last week the UN was in town visiting the thousands of homes that have been partially or totally destroyed by the Rio city government to make way for these ill considered transportation lines. It’s a sad and tragic comedy of Olympian proportions. The hubris and callousness of the Rio city and state government knows no bounds.  According to the Estado do São Paulo newspaper the expectation is that at least 65 thousand Brazilians will lose their homes. The reality is that tens of millions more will be directly and indirectly affected. (Click here for a great story by Tom Phillips).

Transparency: Zero. The Rio 2016 Organizing Committee released the contract that the city signed with the Olympic Committee – 19 months after it was signed. The Brazilian chefão, Carlos Nuzman said that only newspapers would have access to the contract and that the general public would not be able to access what their democratically elected leaders have agreed to do with their money.  The laughable websites www.transparenciaolimpica.com.br and www.cidadeolimpica.com.br continue to function as smokescreens for the funneling of public money into private hands.

Privitization: nota dez. Henrique Mirelles, head of the APO (Public Olympic Authority) and former head of Brazil’s central Bank, has long used coded words to guide his public commentary. His latest was that the Olympics will usher in a new form of public governance.

For the first time I have begun to think that Brazil will not be able to pull these projects together in time for the World Cup. The lack of competency and organization and oversight is staggering and of continental proportions. There are so many moving pieces that have gone unattended for so long that it might be too late to create a functioning mechanism. The government should take over all World Cup operations now, nationalizing the CBF and the World Cup profits. The World Cup was awarded to Brazil in 2007, almost nothing has happened since then. The delays and disorganization serve to increase the cost of everything while necessitating a financial infusion from the state that will invariably be turned into private profit. It is important to remember that the WORKERS’ PARTY (PT) of LULA is behind these developments. Where mega-events are concerned, there is rarely any good news, just talking heads, hollow discourse, and momentary distractions from an increasingly harsh reality. 

The World Cup and the Elimination of Public Memory

The Maracanã is one of the most famous stadiums in all of human history. Constructed to host the 1950 World Cup final, its official capacity was 179,000. Brazilians happily referred to the colossal stadium as “O Maior do Mundo” – the biggest in the world. Over the years, hundreds of thousands gathered in the Maracanã to watch football. To create football. To live football. It was in the Maracanã that Santos F.C. and Pelé won the World Club Championship in 1961. Flamengo and Zico did the same in 1981. Pelé chose the Maracanã as the place to score his 1,000^th goal. Since then, the goal itself has been known as the “Gol de Pelé”. The other goal is known as the “Gol de Garrincha” because that is where, in the 79^th minute of the World Cup final in 1950, with the score tied 1-1, the Uruguayan winger killed the dreams of a nation.

This is not a tale of romanticized melodrama, it’s culture. It’s living, breathing, screaming, flag-waving, carnavelesque culture, and it’s being killed as you read this. . The reforms underway to “prepare” Brazilian stadiums to host the 2014 World Cup are literally eliminating the spaces where Brazilian football culture takes place. The Maracanã has undergone a series of hatchet jobs. In 1999, the capacity was reduced from 179,000 to 129,000. Before the FIFA World Club Championships in 2000, the Maracanã suffered the idiocy of “luxury boxes” that only served to cut off the air circulation and eliminate the use of the monumental ramps that define the stadium’s exterior.  In 2004-2005, a R$450 million reform reduced the capacity to 85,000, eliminated the standing only section, lowered the field by 3 meters, and installed big screen tvs that are about to be thrown out. Why? Because the “Maior do Mundo” is undergoing a projected R$720 million reform that will reduce the capacity to 75,000, install a roof so no one but the players get wet, and will actually reduce the length of the field by 7 meters and its width by 5 meters. Both the Gol de Pelé and the Gol de Garrincha will die. Those spaces, those places, the goal line where history and culture were made and remembered and recreated and forgotten and relived and renewed week after week, season after season, year after year, for six decades – gone. Poof. Já era. Public memory, public culture, one of the constituent elements of civil society – extinguished with a torrent of public money.

This is not only happening in Rio de Janeiro. The Minerão in Belo Horizonte is undergoing the same process. The Fonte Novo in Salvador, already reduced to rubble. The Vivaldão in Manaus is no more. The stadiums that are going up in their place are temples of consumption, sanitized environments that facilitate the circulation of capital, VIP salons where culture is consumed and not produced, air-conditioned fortresses, highly securitized off-worlds, crystalline shopping malls that require one parking spot for every six spectators. The 2014 World Cup stadiums in Fortaleza, Cuiabá, Manaus, Natal, and Brasilia will have no post-cup functionality. The World Cup stadiums will have such high maintenance costs that they can only be supported though public subsidy. We just saw this happen in South Africa, where residents of Cape Town are debating whether or not to implode the Green Point stadium. This is as revolting as it is sickening and immoral.

Why are public officials so willing to invest BILLIONS in public funds to erect stadia that :

1)      have no relationship to the urban environment?

2)      have no post-event uses?

3)      are undertaken with no input from those who use the stadiums?

4)      forcibly dislocate communities to make way for a “clean” television shot?

5)      will never have any economic viability, never make a return on the public investment?

6)      become privatized during the World Cup, where only FIFA security forces operate, where the only profits accrue to FIFA and their rapacious partners?

7)      destroy the very places where public culture and memory are created, preserved, lived, and transformed?

It doesn’t have to be this way. There is a different model. There is a way to make the democratically elected officials wake up from their soporific state of infatuation with corrupt FIFA overlords. The Minster of Sport and Culture, a member of the Communist Party of Brazil, is leading the way towards the destruction of sport and culture. O que isso?!?!! The project of ANT (torcedores.org) is to change the direction of these projects, to democratize the World Cup, to make it something Brazilian, not something from Switzerland. Within two weeks of ANT’s foundation the association has nearly 1,000 members throughout Brazil. One by one, the march of the formigas (ants) will grow, and by sheer force of numbers the white elephants will be consumed.

Maracanã robbed! Botafogo Wins Carioca, the odyssey begins

The office of TWA, the company responsible for selling tickets to the Maracanã was robbed on Saturday, complicating ticket sales for the final game of the Taça Rio between Botafogo and Flamengo (won by O Glorioso). How is it that an office housed within the stadium itself, guarded by a special Stadium Police Force (GEPE) and a private security firm, behind 3 meter gates can get robbed the night before the final game of the championship? Strange indeed. 


Other robberies probably took place during the game as the law requiring that all game receipts be made public within 24 hours has been ignored by FERJ. The only information regarding attendance and money is that there were 50,303 paying spectators that generated R$ 1,677,565, for an average ticket price of R$33.34 - far above the R$19,00 average for the semi-finals. This is obviously incomplete information as the Vasco x Flamengo game had more than 6,000 free tickets issued. The entierty of the receipts for the Campeonato Carioca can be found here - with the glaring exception of yesterday's final. Curious. (Note - the receipts were posted on Tuesday 20/04)


With the end of the Carioca, we may actually see the beginning of the construction project for the 2014 World Cup, but don't hold your breath as there don't appear to be any architects, engineers, or anyone at all contracted to carry off the R$ 600,000,000 reforms. 

Casaca, Casaca, Casaca-saca-saca

Vasco (3) x Fluminese (0) Campeonato Carioca, Taça Rio, 28 Março 2010-03-29

Judging from the number of hits from the English speaking parts of the Americas, I am going to write this one for the northerners.

I make no secret of my footballing allegiances: Carolina RailHawks, New England Revolution, USA Nats, Celtic, Brighton and Hove Albion, St. Etienne, Ajax, Barcelona, Boca Juniors, Argentina, São Raimundo, Figurense, Vasco da Gama. I understand myself, and football, well enough to know that this list is conditioned by geography, emotional experiences, media, conscious and unconscious choices, caprice and accident. The only way to rank this list would be to put some electrodes on my head and show me a series of goals for and against and evaluate my emotional reaction. I don’t pretend to understand it myself, but everyone in Rio wants to know why eu torço pelo Vasco. Torço, porra, e já.

Until yesterday, I had never been to a game in the Campeonato Carioca (which I describe here). But Vasco were playing at a reasonable hour, the Rio State Football Federation (FERJ) managed to get their act together enough to use the Maracanã for a clássico, and so on Saturday I went to Fluminese F.C. to buy my ticket, knowing that on game day tickets are not available at the stadium. The cheapest ticket was R$40 (and sócios were not entitled to a discount).

I took the Metrô, which has recently changed to eliminate the need to get off at the Estácio station in order to change from line 1 to line 2. Except for the weekends. Of course there was no information about this, so when the train went to Praça Onze, I assumed that I had boarded the wrong train, went back to Central, and then didn’t get on the next train because the shiny new flat screen tv in the station said that it was headed to Saens Peña, not towards Maracanã. Incredibly, there was someone there to explain that I needed to look at the small sign on the map on the inside of the train to know that on weekends, the old transfer system is still in place. Anyway, I can’t decide if my confusion resulted from familiarity or from ignorance, but at least 4 other people asked me for help in getting onto the right train to go to the game. The cars were full of people headed back to the Zona Norte after a day at the beach plus Vasco and Flu fans headed to the Maracanã. 

Crossing the bridge from the Metrô to the Maracanã, one always enconuters cambistas, selling tickets. But who do they think they’re kidding, scalping tickets for a game that was 69,000 people short of a sellout? More curious, FERJ was actually selling tickets on the day of the game! I was dumbfounded. One never knows just what system is going to be in place for a given match.

Walking up the rampa monumental, which is one of the few elements of the Maracanã that will not be completely renovated for the World Cup because it is tombado (lit: entombed) as a cultural patrimony, there were a series of signs that were not present when I last visited. These signs say: Use Collective Transport; Don’t buy tickets from scalpers; In the end, you are a fan of the World Cup; Celebrate in Peace. Ironically, one of the biggest concerns that FIFA has with the Maracanã is the lack of parking. More irony stems from the fact that the scalpers are there because FERJ and the teams can’t figure out how to sell tickets effectively. These new signs also point to the use of the stadium as a disciplinary space, something which Gilmar Mascerenhas and I wrote about some time ago. 

I saw dozens of Vasco fans wearing the new 3^rd strip which ‘only’ costs R$199,90 (US$120). The jersey is modeled on the Maltese Cross that fronted the armor of the Knights Templar as they protected Christian pilgrims on their way to the Holy Land. My first introduction to the Templars was in Umberto Eco’s book Foucault’s Pendulum, which I though was pretty cool when I read it 20 years ago. However, my fascination with a Christian military order protecting religious fanatics on their way to the newly sacked Jerusalem has taken a more critical turn. I can understand the economic logic that C.R. Vasco da Gama has in launching a new kit for R$199,90 (of which only about R$8 goes to the club), but the symbolic logic is a bit of a stretch for me. One of the cool things about Vasco is that they are never afraid to reach back into the middle ages in search of iconography that will rally the troops, as it were. The launching of the new jersey has political overtones within the club as there's some confusion between the current president Roberto Dinamite and the former, disgraced president Eurico Miranda. I was shocked to see a banner supporting the latter, and have taken the liberty of making a small alteration. One wonders what the Vasguaçu torcida is getting from Miranda. 

  

The Maracanã is both amazing and ordinary, one of the most well known sporting venues in the world that is part of the everyday reality of the city. Of course, it’s always like this. For people living in Jerusalem in the Middle Ages, the Holy Land wasn’t something to be continually amazed about and maybe it wasn’t even wholly Holy, but ask a Templar how he felt about getting there. I’m getting used to the Maracanã, but I always find something new to occupy my attention.

The obvious: there are yellow lines behind all of the seats in the arquibancada. Not so obvious: these were the old seats, replaced in 1999 in preparation for the World Club Championships (for you ManU fans, this was the FIFA competition that Sir Alex sacrificed a run at the FA Cup for). What’s surprising here is that 11 years and hundreds of millions of dollars of reforms later, the lines are still there.

The obvious: reclining in a green seat just isn’t possible. Not so obvious: this forces people to lean towards the field actually forcing them to pay more attention to what is happening on the field. What’s to come: all of these ass-catching seats will be replaced with chairs so that World Cup fans can consume their spectacle more passively. This is going to further diminish the capacity, but no one is saying by how much. FIFA demands, millions obey.

The obvious: the luxury boxes aren’t particularly luxurious and have terrible sight lines, especially those stuck behind the enormous television screens installed for the 2007 Pan American Games. Not so obvious: these luxury boxes increase the heat of the stadium by cutting off air flow, make the rampas monumentais unusable and more than doubles the amount of time it takes to empty the stadium. What’s to come: the luxury boxes are going below the upper level of stands, which will bullox the lower seats (installed in 2006), which will then have to be demolished and built anew. FIFA demands, millions pay.

 

The obvious: leaning slightly back in your seat on a clear night, the elliptical form of the roof makes both the sky and the stadium seem connected, huge, único. The roof catches sound and whips it through the stadium augmenting the noise, but also letting it escape into the city. Last night, the roof framed an azure sky as the moon passed overhead and Christo celebrated a goal on his perch. What’s to come: the roof is going to extend to cover the lower section of seats, cutting out the sky, reducing a majestic arc to a doughnut hole. FIFA demands, culture disappears, architecture suffers. 

One final curiosity: because of a long standing tradition of keeping the hand in the till, FERJ and the CBF are now required by law to report how much money is taken in and how many people were in the stadium. Last night's match had a total renda of R$383,500 and a paying audience of 13,096. This means that every person who paid did so at an average of R$29.29. However, there were officially 19,607 people in the stadium, dropping the average ticket to R$19.55. This also means that 33% of the people in the stadium didn't pay to get in! You have got to be kidding me. The logic here is baffling and perhaps some people from MBA soccer can buzz down here and help me with this. Charging more for tickets reduces attendance, which dimnishes overall revenue, so in order to increase attendance, more people get in for free? Did the Templars come up with this system for transporting people to the Holy Land?

Whatever about the Templars, the new kit did the trick for Vasco in the second half and they overwhelmed Fluminese who deserved better from their strong first half showing. With so much going on in the stadium it's kind of hard to concentrate on football but next time I promise some kind of match report.  

Campeonato Carioca

Today’s lesson in the geography of the obvious deals with the phenomenon of state soccer tournaments in Brazil. Each of the 26 Brazilian states holds multi-division tournaments between January and April, with the winner of the first division tournament gaining direct qualification for the Copa do Brasil (Brazil’s version of the FA Cup or US Open Cup). It is only after the end of the state tournaments that the four divisions of the Brazilian National Championship begin.

Why the state tournaments endure as a central feature of the Brazilian football calendar is something that I talk about in chapter two of Temples of the Earthbound Gods. The state tournaments are remnants of an era of the relative geographic isolation of Brazilian urban centers. Brazil is the same size as the continental United States, but the lack of efficient road, rail, and air transportation between the coastal cities and the interior has the effect of increasing geographic distance (as long as we consider time and space to be mutually constitutive). Because it was prohibitively expensive and time consuming to travel between Brazil’s major urban centers for most of the 20^th century, state tournaments made much more sense than a national tournament. Even today, the lower divisions of Brazilian football are organized on a regional basis because it is simply not possible for smaller teams to afford weekly air travel.

The advent of the Brazilian national championship (Brasilerão) in 1971 was as much a political project as a sporting one: the military government wanted a way to integrate the country through the popularity of football, using the Selecão’s third World Cup victory in 1970 to obtain political ends. That the Brasilerão changed its rules 31 times between 1971 and 2003 didn’t endear it to the general population and the state tournaments continued to hold more cultural importance for fans well into the 1990s.

The traditional state powers from the main urban centers were able to use the Brasilerão and television contracts to get bigger, while the teams that only competed in the state tournaments became relatively smaller, sending their best players up the food chain. So the situation we have today in Rio de Janeiro is that no team outside of the big four (Vasco, Botafogo, Fluminese, Flamengo) has won a state title since 1966, and only Americano, Volta Redonda and Madureira have managed to finish second in the last 40 years. Yesterday, Olaria managed to beat Vasco for the first time since 1971. This is front page news in Rio.

The state tournaments have turned into a training ground for the bigger clubs throughout Brazil. Attendances are abysmal, games are lopsided, and the influence of the OGlobo network on game times ensures that this situation will continue as mid week games can only begin after the novelas have ended at 10pm. Worse, the Rio State Football Federation can’t even make the Maracanã ticketing system work. They no longer sell tickets on the day of the game, and the stadium can no longer host clasicos because no one will take responsibility for managing the turnstiles. It’s a joke. The recent developments have highlighted the staggering amount of institutional change that is going to be necessary before Brazil is ready to host the World Cup in 2014.

After talking with Juca Kufuri about the insane state of affairs in Brazilan football, he suggested that the CBF and its corrupt puppet master Ricardo Teixeira intentionally keep Brazilian football in a state of chaos in order to valorize the Brazilian National Team at the expense of the clubs. If you go to any football store in the world, you will find jerseys of club and national teams from England, Italy, Spain, Germany, and Argentina. You will rarely if ever see a Brazilian club team jersey, but will always be able to find the CBF jersey. This is obvious but not accidental. The Brazilian football calendar is grossly out of synch with the International calendar, allowing European teams to poach Brazilian players in the middle of the Campeonato Brasileiro, further weakening the club game in Brazil.

Tonight there is a classico between Flamengo and Botafogo at the Fechadão. There won’t be many people in the stands, because the stadium accesses are terrible and potentially dangerous when two rival torcidas are arriving via the same transportation lines at the same time. The lack of planning on the part of the state and national federations is aggravated by the lack of concern shown by the city government and the absurd influence of the major television networks. All of these factors, plus the increasingly rapid decline of the smaller teams relative to the big teams in Rio has made for one of the worst Cariocas in recent memory – a situation produced by history, geography, politics, and economics that can only be relieved by the raw potential of football to transform the mundane into sublime.

Learning to swear, carioca style

Fluminese 1 x Coritiba 3
Campionato Brasileiro, Serie A
Maracanã
16 August 2009

For many years, when I told people that my research was "stadiums in Latin America", the inevitable response was, "Have you ever been to that huge stadium, I can't remember its name, but it holds, like, four hundred thousand people, that must be crazy." The name of the stadium is Estádio Mario Filho, aka Maracanã. Yes, I have been there, many times, and it doesn't hold nearly as many people as it used to. It can be crazy though it’s also just a local stadium where people go week in, week out to watch soccer.

The Maracanã is arguably the most famous stadium in the world. Built for the 1950 World Cup, the original capacity was somewhere between 180,000 and 190,000. The Brazilians were so sure that they were going to win the 1950 World Cup that they offered to paint this colossus, the biggest stadium in the world, the grandest stadium since Imperial Rome’s Circus Maximus, the stadium that was to represent Brazil’s emergence as South America’s post World War II industrial, technological, and cultural leader – in the colors of the winning team. On 16 July 1950, 220,000 people witnessed the unthinkable. To this day the Maracana is celeste, the sky-blue of Uruguay a continual reminder of the folly of hubris. It is surprising that so few Brazilians know the story behind the colors.

Despite the infamy and drama, going to the Maracanã is really just an ordinary thing to do on a Sunday afternoon in Rio. I arrived late to the game but there were so many others doing the same that I wondered if the kickoff hadn’t been delayed. I bought my R$20 ($US 12) ticket for the cadeira comum and hustled into the stadium. Fluminese were a goal down after fifteen minutes and the fans were clearly angry. There wasn’t much to recommend in the play of either team – Fluminese entered the game second from bottom and Coritiba third from bottom. This was a mid season relegation battle.



Before half-time, I moved from behind the goal to behind the player’s benches and below the media cabins. This is usually the most crowded section of the stadium as the fans are within earshot of the coaches and players. When I first started going to the Maracanã in 2003, this area was known as the geral, an open area where young men ran back and forth screaming at the players, coaches, and referees. The geral was eliminated in 2006, reducing the capacity of the stadium to 87,000 (from an already diminished 119,000) . Families have taken the place of the ruffians and it is no longer possible to watch the game form the railings as Military Police shunt everyone into seats before kickoff. This hasn’t stopped the streams of vitriol flowing from the stands to the pitch, but the police are omni-present.



One of the other changes that has come with the architectural modification is that prices have increased from R$5 to R$20. It literally goes without saying that when you put people in seats they become more sedate. But there is plenty of evidence to suggest that the former geral, now cadeira comum, continues as a place where the norms and mores of Brazilian society are transferred from one generation to the next. I can’t decide if it’s funny or not, but hearing dozens of pre-teen voices fill the air with “Oi juiz, vai tomar no cu!” (Hey referee, go take it up the ass!) is pretty funny.





One of the main differences between going to a stadium in Europe or the USA and Latin America is the amount of information about the event. At the Maracanã, there is a scoreboard but no game clock, no game day programs, no stats, no player profile magazines, nothing. People just know these things. There is also no place to buy souvenirs, and no half-time show. There is half-time entertainment, though it hardly compares in Lolita-esque sensuality with the RailHawk dancers. I hope to get an interview with this guy in the coming weeks. He goes the length of the pitch and then returns to midfield, which takes him about 15 minutes.



Fluminese went 2-0 down mid-way through the second half, thanks to some shocking defending and even worse goal-keeping. The newly reinstated coach, Renato Gaucho, clearly had nothing and no one to bring off the bench and paced the sideline with his head in his hands. Somehow, a long ball out of defense combined with a lucky bounce and a bit of pace to pull a goal back for Fluminese, but hope was short lived as Coritiba killed the game on a counter-attack. Once the result was beyond doubt, the fans spilled into the old geral to take up their swearing positions. There was nothing the police could do but let the abuse wash over them and onto the coaching staff and players.

In the movie clip below, there is an impressive diversity of ages, all screaming “Frangeiro” which can be loosely translated as “chicken shit”. Those familiar with Monty Pyton will be surprised to see a cameo by the “It’s” man. Just another Sunday at the Maracanã.