Professor Flávio de Campos, coordinator of the University of São Paulo’s Ludens Interdisciplinary Research Center for Football and Recreational Activities, say the World Cup merely exposed some of Brazil’s problem on and off the pitch. He summarized the issues by illustrating it with the Selecao’s performance, as the national team is nicknamed.
He said: “David Luiz committed a mistake in the first German goal and then he voluntarily tried to resolve the problems of society, going forward out of position like a madman, to bring joy to his people.
“These are boys. The pressure is great. It was a pathological part of Brazilian culture to want to find leaders and heroes in footballers and politicians. At 5:00pm we were looking for heroes. By 7:00pm, we were looking for villains. It is madness,” he said.
As the country puts the World Cup behind it, those tensions will play out in October’s presidential campaign and then in preparations for another huge global sporting event – the 2016 Summer Olympic Games. Many Brazilians say the conflicts that emerged in the months before the World Cup perfectly captures the issues the country faces.
“They promised us a new country, and that obviously didn’t happen,” Jorge Diogo Souza Costa, a resident of Recife, one of the host cities for the World Cup, said. “The negative reaction to that has totally changed the political discourse in the country, and topics like schools, transportation and healthcare, in contrast to the stadiums, have become commonplace.”
A Police crackdown on a small protest against a bus fare hike in Rio last year brought more than a million people into the streets across the country. They brought up a wide array of grievances, especially government’s failure to provide adequate public services. To many, government services appeared agonisingly meager and betray the country’s new, shiny and expensive soccer stadiums.
“There was a widespread feeling that, if our country could create stadiums of that size and quality, then why couldn’t we also carry out other projects and public services that well?” says Laurindo Leal Filho, a sociologist at the University of Sao Paulo.
“Now that the event is over, the population will have even greater demands for public projects and services. For both the government and the political opposition, the conversation has changed,” he said.
President Dilma Rousseff once enjoyed a popularity rating of about 80 per cent. This has sharply dropped to 40, according to a survey of eligible voters by the Brazilian polling firm Datafolha. Though, Rousseff is leading the line ahead of the polls, she comes up against a stiff challenge from Aecio Neves, who represents a party linked to the country’s traditional elite.
The Brazilian economy has been battling series of challenges in recent times with massive job loses witnessed a few months ago, the highlight. Though, the excitement of the World Cup appeared to douse tensions for a while and take attention away from politics, economy and the real social issues, the Selecao’s humiliating defeat to Germany in the semis, quickly reminded the entire nation of its barrage of problems.
“A lot of money was spent on building stadiums, but it ended up for nothing. I think there will be more anti-government protests because this is simply unacceptable,” Anderson Santos, 30, who manages gyms in the city of Natal, said.
In two years, Rio’s Barra da Tijuca neighborhood will host the Olympics. It is an area close to some of the city’s infamous favelas where ruthless gangs hold sway. After spending more than $13 billion to stage the World Cup this year, the most expensive in history, in a country where millions of ordinary citizens live below the poverty line and are desperate for interventions in health and education, Rousseff and her administration now have an even bigger task at hand – to deliver an Olympic Games devoid of crises. She must also move quickly to placate dozens of her furious compatriots by providing badly needed social amenities and restore fast-fading trust and sense of belonging.
And as the party mode of the World Cup gradually fizzles into a massive cleanup that is the first phase of the buildup to the Olympics in two years time, many of the country’s over 200 million citizens would be hoping for a swift improvement in public services and employment opportunities. For this category, the homecoming of football’s greatest show and the world’s biggest single event, rather than bringing them massive gains, has only compounded their pains.
