Photo by Victor Moriyama/Getty Images
It was right after a missed Brazil free kick that Luiz Marinho, my Airbnb host in Rio de Janeiro, looked at me over the feijoada his housemate Francisco had prepared and said: “If Brazil loses, there will be a revolution.”
On the television in the kitchen of the Ipanema house that his father
bought in the 1960s and that Marinho has been trying to sell for years,
the Brazilian national team was slouching toward a 1–0 win against Serbia
in a World Cup tune-up. Nobody in the kitchen gave a damn about the
result. The TV was on out of habit, and they seemed annoyed to have to
endure what had come to represent the great national bugbear. At one
point, Ronaldo appeared on screen to do commentary. Everyone in the
kitchen hissed. "He's fake," Marinho said. In the São Paulo stadium,
Brazilian fans were booing Neymar. Brazilians, the most happy-go-lucky,
most soccer-loving people in the world, were jeering their own team on
the eve of the World Cup. How had it come to this?
FIFA is how.
Oh, and another thing: FIFA doesn't care.
Every four years, the Fédération Internationale de Football
Association, a Swiss bank that occasionally stages soccer games, alights
on a country for a month or so to plunder as much bullion as possible.
In 2010, the target was South Africa, where FIFA wrung max dollars from
government deals and compelled the construction of stadiums—several of
which may never again be filled—in a country with some of the highest
income inequality in the world. This business model has been replicated
in Brazil, where $3.6 billion of taxpayer money has gone toward stadium
construction in a country that can no better afford such expenditures. The event's overall price tag is somewhere north of $11 billion.
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