Stadium Ruins
By A surprisingly harsh and direct article by Juliet Macur in the Times on the complete idiocy of stadium building for the World Cup. A lot of these new stadiums not only cost a ton of money, but they weren’t even built in cities with functioning soccer teams that can even come close to filling them up. They are used for 5 or 6 games and then just left to rot. The stadiums cost billions of dollars in total in a poor nation. What a total waste of money.
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.)
Already the stadiums from South Africa 2010 are ghost towns.
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.
It’s no wonder that peoples are starting to reject holding mega sporting events. Easier for FIFA to place the events in countries dominated by egocentric quasi-dictatorial leaders than democracies. Everyone is cool with the bribes in that set-up too.