The 2014 Brazil World Cup Countdown Begins!

[Macmoish]

Independent Monday, 12 July 2010

Just 1,432 days to go until it all starts again...

The World Cup heads to Brazil for 2014, and the hosts are already under huge pressure. Can they win, and win in style? And will travel issues spoil the party?

Sixty years ago one of the all-time great Brazil sides thrashed Sweden 7-1 and Spain 6-1. Then, needing just a draw to become world champions, they found the occasion too much and let Uruguay come from behind to win 2-1. That was in 1950, the last time Brazil staged the World Cup. Then, there were only 50 million Brazilians demanding victory. In four years' time, there will be 200 million. The pressure facing the Brazil side who will host the next tournament in 2014 will be greater than any other team has ever known – and the squad will have to be built from scratch.

The side Dunga took to South Africa was one of the oldest ever to represent Brazil in a World Cup. Few of them will be around in 2014. There will be no qualifiers for the hosts to prepare their players – at senior level between now and the next World Cup there is only the 2011 Copa America and the Confederations Cup two years later. Alarm bells are ringing in the CBF, Brazil's FA.

A new coach will almost certainly be appointed in the next two weeks – in a month's time Brazil are back in action in a friendly against the United States. But more important than the haste is the long haul. CBF president Ricardo Teixeira is keen for the new man to take on responsibility for grooming the next generation – in addition to the senior side, he is also likely to take charge of the Under-20s and, assuming Brazil qualify, the Under-23 side that will go to the London Olympics.

This, then, is an important choice for the future direction of the national team – and it comes at a fascinating moment. Brazil's status – and attraction to its international sponsors – is based as much on quality as quantity. As important as the five World Cups won is the manner in which its best teams have played. Brazil are the great entertainers, the spiritual guardians of the "jogo bonito", the beautiful game.

But the advertising line is under attack from reality. Brazil continue to count on breathtaking individual talent, but the team in South Africa were only the latest in a line of pragmatic sides. Where the central midfield was once populated by the world's best passers of the ball, these days Brazil choose artless giants whose skills are primarily defensive. This goes far beyond Dunga – it is the direction that Brazilian football has taken. Similar traits could be observed last year in Brazil's teams at both the Under-17 and Under-20 World Cups.

In the brutal world of domestic Brazilian football, where the job security of coaches is notoriously precarious, there is little space for the romantic dreamer. The coaches are usually hard-headed pragmatists. In recent years, the most successful has been Muricy Ramalho, now with Fluminense having previously won three consecutive league titles with Sao Paulo between 2006 and 2009. An arch-pragmatist, he makes no concessions whatsoever to style. Can Brazil's reputation survive another coach with these characteristics?

Leonardo would be an interesting wild card. The former international has never coached in Brazil, but has top-level experience in Europe after spending last season in charge of Milan – and despite his sacking, he did better than might have been expected after inheriting an ageing squad that had just lost his fellow countryman Kaka to Real Madrid. Excellent at public relations and with an idealistic commitment to attacking football, Leonardo has announced that he is interested and available – which gives him an advantage over the people's choice.

Luiz Felipe Scolari's photograph was on the front page of daily sport newspaper Lance! after Brazil lost their quarter-final to Holland. Following his adventure in Portugal, England and Uzbekistan, Scolari has returned to Brazil – but has rejoined Palmeiras, where he is set to be under contract until the end of 2012. Teixeira has dismissed the idea that Brazil could share their coach with a club side, leaving Scolari out of the running unless he walks out on a club he has just joined.

It could be that Scolari is playing a waiting game. Teixeira admits that short-term results are not a priority, but every defeat of the national team sets off a mini-crisis in the Brazilian media. Losing matches is more likely with a young team in formation – it happened on the watch of Falcao, when the great midfielder set about rebuilding Brazil after the 1990 World Cup. Results cost him his job. After years as a TV pundit, Falcao is an outside bet to return.

But whoever takes over now runs the risk of paying the price of the rebuilding process – leaving Scolari to pick up the reins in the final straight and make a bid for immortality by steering Brazil to victory on home turf.

New blood: the players likely to star in 2014

Neymar (Santos, 18)

Like a young Robinho with more goalscoring potential. Extraordinary skill, but needs to avoid the pitfalls of premature hype – flopped, for example, in the World Under-17 Cup

Thiago Silva (Milan, 25)

Classy centre-back who was a reserve in South Africa and will now be pushing for a first-team place

Alexandre Pato(Milan, 20)

Striker of electric pace and cool finishing. Let himself down in the Olympics and Confederations Cup, but may now be given the chance to spearhead Brazil's attack

www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/world-cup/just-1432-days-to-go-until-it-all-starts-again-2024419.html

[Macmoish]

Independent / Tim Vickery

Size of Brazil's problems: vast distances, a lack of airports and crumbling stadiums

"Building work which has hardly been finished, pitches in a poor state, crime, problematic traffic and bad services have made Brazilians feel at home [in South Africa]," wrote Andre Kfouri in Lance!, Brazil's sports daily, on 19 June. "It is hard to imagine that in 2014 our reality will be better."

Kfouri drew two conclusions. "The first is obvious; if South Africa can stage a World Cup, so can Brazil." The second – "the tournament seems to be passing through a period of adaptation so that no one gets a fright in four years."

For all of Brazil's growing economic strength and international importance, staging a World Cup presents huge challenges. Some, as Kfouri outlined, are similar to South Africa. But there are also extra ones, the consequence of staging it in a country the size of a continent.

How will teams and fans get around such a large country?

"I've always said that the 2014 World Cup faces three major problems," said Ricardo Teixeira, the long-term president of the CBF (Brazil's FA) at an event last week to launch the tournament logo. "The first is airports, the second is airports and the third is airports."

Brazil is more than seven-times bigger than South Africa. Air travel will be a necessity, but the 2014 hosts currently lack the capacity to move World Cup-sized crowds around the country. Recent tournaments have had all the teams constantly moving around the host nation. In Brazil, this will surely be impractical. In a reversion to the system prevalent until the 1990 tournament in Italy, groups will almost certainly be staged within one of four sectors.

The split is likely to be as follows; a central axis of Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte and Salvador, a southern block of Porto Alegre, Curitiba and Sao Paulo, a north-eastern group of Fortaleza, Natal and Recife, and an inland collection of Brasilia, Cuiaba and Manaus.

With huge variations in temperatures in the north and south, teams could find themselves playing in searing heat one game and freezing rain the next.

This will be a second successive winter World Cup, in a country where the term has no meaning in many regions. The likes of Manaus, Cuiaba, Fortaleza and Natal are likely to have temperatures well over 30 degrees in June and July. But Porto Alegre and Curitiba in the south may well be under 10 degrees, and could even be at freezing point. Teams based in one region for their group matches may suffer when the knock-out stage takes them to another.


Is it likely to be a well organised or an administrative nightmare?

For all the obstacles of nature, the biggest impediment to the smooth running of the 2014 World Cup is man-made: the political structure of Brazilian football.

For South Africa, staging the World Cup was rooted in the anti-apartheid struggle. In the mind of Danny Jordaan, activist turned World Cup CEO, the two things are indivisible. The point of the struggle was to forge a new South Africa. The tournament was part of a process involving the resistance and the dreams of millions of people – hence the joy when South Africa was confirmed as host.

What is the main stumbling block?

For all its progress, the moment in Brazil is very different. Its football administrators could not be further removed from activists. They represent the old, semi-feudal Brazil.

Federal Deputy Paulo Rattes wrote a Congressional report on 2014 planning. "What struck me about South Africa," he said, "was that there was participation from society and political leaders." In Brazil, meanwhile, "it is a black box that no one enters, only Ricardo Teixeira and his friends."

Teixeira has been in power since 1989. His power base is formed by the presidents of the football federations in the 27 states that comprise this giant country, some of whom have been in power for longer than him.

Teixeira's need to keep his power base onside has already affected the organisation of the tournament. Many state presidents wanted 2014 games to be staged in their domain, so the CBF successfully lobbied Fifa to have 12 host cities, rather than the original plan of between eight and 10. Seventeen cities applied – one later pulled out – and, to save Teixeira from the political embarrassment of excluding some of them, the final decision was pushed to Fifa.

All this took time. The formal announcement that Brazil would stage the World Cup came in October 2007, but it was clear Brazil would be awarded the tournament as far back as March 2003 – Sepp Blatter said that 2014 would go to South America, and Conmebol quickly announced that Brazil was its only candidate, although Colombia later briefly broke ranks. The host cities were not named until the end of last May. This delay has already left insufficient time for a number of transport infrastructure projects. This may not have a great impact on 2014 – the South African experience has shown that inadequate urban transport is not a giant headache in a World Cup because, for such a special event, people tend to turn up early. But it does mean the tournament's legacy will fall short of potential.


Will the stadiums be ready on time?

As Fifa's inspection report pointed out in 2007, Brazil is not counting on a single stadium meeting World Cup standards. Money will be thrown at the problem – but whose? And where is the return? Nine of the stadiums are owned by regional government, although they could be privatised or administered by private companies. But it is unclear how the grounds in Cuiaba and Manaus can be viable. And some of the other projects are reformations of existing stadiums – expensive jobs which will still leave a large gap between the pitch and the fans – a mode of construction generally considered obsolete.

Resources for the work are coming from a credit line set up by the BNDES, the state development bank. Three of the stadiums are owned by clubs, two of whom are extremely wary of taking on debt. It will probably take an injection of regional government funds to ensure that Atletico Paranaense's stadium in Curitiba is able to host games. The real problem, though, is in Sao Paulo.

Morumbi, Sao Paulo FC's giant ground, is well short of the required standard. Trying to keep costs down, the club have sent a number of reform proposals to Fifa, all of which have been rejected. As it stands, Morumbi is out of the running. And with the Sao Paulo government pledging not to spend any money on stadium work, the biggest city in South America faces the prospect of missing out on World Cup fixtures. This would be extraordinary, and there will be feverish meetings over the next few weeks to try to find a solution.


Is there any good news?

Though all of Brazil ended up crying over the final defeat to Uruguay, the 1950 World Cup played an important role in developing the game. Previous Copa Americas staged in Brazil had been almost exclusively restricted to Rio and Sao Paulo. In 1950, the action stretched up to Recife and down to Porto Alegre and Curitiba – as well as to Belo Horizonte, where England lost that fateful game to the United States. The tournament helped to decentralise the game and paved the way for a national championship to be launched in 1971. The 2014 World Cup can have a similar impact, dragging Brazilian football into the 21st century. But, rather like Dunga's team in that quarter-final against Holland, potential and performance are not necessarily the same thing


www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/world-cup/size-of-brazils-problems-vast-distances-a-lack-of-airports-and-crumbling-stadiums-2024420.html

[Lonegunmen]

Can england continue to display a bunch of under achievers.

[Macmoish]

Guardian

Brazil World Cup in disarray as construction falls way behind schedule
Fifa anxious as work has started at only six of the 12 stadiums chosen for 2014, while locals query choice of venues

Tom Phillips in Rio de Janeiro guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 13 July

And so to 2014. Three years ago, when Brazil was unveiled as the host of the next World Cup, the country's president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, promised a tournament so well organised that even his country's greatest rivals – the Argentinians – would be unable to criticise it. Now, however, even Brazilians are starting to speak out against the lack of progress in stadium construction and infrastructure projects, amid concern over corruption and bad planning and calls for the number of host cities to be cut from 12 to 10.

Speaking in May to Brazilian journalists in South Africa, Fifa's secretary general, Jérôme Valcke, was blunt. "It is incredible how behind Brazil is," he said. "Many deadlines have gone by and nothing has happened. Brazil is not on the right track."

Government authorities openly admit how behind their plans they are. "The World Cup is just around the corner," Brazil's sports minister, Orlando Silva, admitted in a recent interview. "From 12 July onwards we will become the focus. We have to quicken our pace."

Brazil's ambitious 2014 bid included plans for five new stadiums, in Salvador, Recife, Cuiabá, Manaus and Natal. Seven other stadiums are supposed to be given radical makeovers in order to meet Fifa regulations. But according to reports in the Brazilian media, construction work has begun only in six of the 12 stadiums, with serious question marks hanging over the long-term financial viability of several of the projects in cities where games usually attract only a few thousand fans.

"None of these projects have taken off because all of the money is coming from the public sector; a very, very good indication that they are not financially viable," says Christopher Gaffney, a geography professor at the Universidade Federal Fluminense in Rio, who describes the stadiums as a "disaster foretold".

Ricardo Araújo, an economist and expert in stadium management who runs a blog dedicated to charting the progress of Brazilian stadium construction, believes Brazil's World Cup bid was destined to face problems from the moment the 12 host cities were selected. "The first mistake was the choice of the host cities – the whole process was political," says Araújo, who argues that the Brazilian football association, the CBF, opted for 12 host cities rather than a more manageable 10 as a result of pressure from its president, Ricardo Teixeira, who sees himself as a possible successor to the Fifa president, Sepp Blatter, and was keen to garner support from regional football federations.

"The first criteria used to select host cities should be about sport. Does the city have football, does it have strong local teams? There is no point in taking the World Cup to a great city with roads, a beautiful airport and hotels if it has no football clubs," said Araujo.

Yet instead of opting for cities such as Belém or Goiânia, with respected local clubs and large numbers of fans, the authorities decided to use cities such as Manaus in the Amazon, which was chosen over its regional neighbour Belém, and Brazil's capital, Brasília. "It isn't true to say that a country's capital must be a host city. You need to have games where there are crowds and above all where the are going to be crowds after the World Cup," Araujo said.

"Belém has a strong footballing tradition, it has clubs that have played in the first division and in the Libertadores Cup and has a good crowd average. Manaus on the other hand has virtually no football at all. It has one club in the Serie D with an average of around 1,000 fans per game. You cannot think about building a stadium for half a dozen games that then closes after the World Cup."

Concerns over Brazil's preparations for the 2014 World Cup are not limited to the stadiums. While Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, the country's two largest cities, boast large numbers of hotels, other host cities, particularly Brasília, fall woefully short of the mark.

Transport is also a major problem. Even in the country's affluent south-east, motorways are often crater-ridden dual carriageways; in the poorer north-east and mid-west their standard is frequently life-threateningly bad. Many of Brazil's airports are currently stretched to breaking point by demand, while multibillion- dollar plans for a TGV-style "bullet train" between Rio and São Paulo have struggled to get off the ground.

In January this year the government announced that R$20.1bn (£7.6bn) would be spent preparing Brazil for the World Cup, including R$2.5bn on airport improvements and R$1bn on hotels. But analysts believe that even with that cash injection Brazil is unlikely to make significant progress until at least next year.

Araujo dismissed the suggestion that the delays might lead Fifa to host the 2014 World Cup elsewhere, as some sections of the Brazilian media have suggested. "The big problem will not be about hosting the event, the World Cup is not at risk," he said. "The big risk is about us, about Brazil, about white elephants and about several billions being poured down the drain on stadiums that will never be used after the World Cup


www.guardian.co.uk/sport/blog/2010/jul/13/brazil-world-cup-2014-delays