FIFA World Cup 2014 in Brazil: In the cathedral of football, an attempt on its soul

A girl plays soccer in front of graffiti in Brazil

Sport is beautiful. It’s beautiful beyond measure.

It entices our gullible hearts into an inexplicable love and consumes us in its seducing charm. We spend hours of our days admiring the beauty of a perfect free kick, lost in the grandeur of a flawless forehand. We follow the lives of athletes around the world, we care for their health, worry about their emotions, and somehow their lives become ours. And towards men we might never meet and places we might never visit we nurture a deep, if strange affection.

The athlete for all the hours of toil and pain earns his money. That isn’t why he does it, but there’s a gain, tangible, real. Why do we, the more normal amongst people, unburdened by unnatural gifts, spend our hours watching them?

Perhaps it’s like visiting the art gallery. We watch it for we can recognize a craft done at its highest form. We are aware of the extra ordinary talent that it takes to create a masterpiece, the years of struggle that precede the ability to produce world class. Or maybe we do it just because we are social creatures, always looking for an identity beyond our own, one that gives us a sense of belonging. Somehow it makes us feel better about ourselves.

Whichever the reason, it’s undeniable that sport has played a vital role in our society and has in general, enriched the human experience.

Why else would we romanticise about it, write endlessly of matches that will be irrelevant in a matter of weeks? It holds communities together, and brings people closer to each other at a time when we have increasingly fewer reasons to do so. In many ways, sport is an ideal, an ideal for what effort can achieve, and an ideal for how far passion can go, a level playing field where race and religion dissolve into the background as men fight as equals for an irrelevant prize.

But ever so often, there comes an event which makes us reconsider the nature of relationship the society has with sport, revaluate the amount of importance that we place on eleven men and a ball. Brazil is one such.

On a Thursday evening in early June, as the crowd erupted into a thunder of joy witnessing what they had only dreamt of for the past seven years, their beloved seleção walk out onto one of their own stadiums, it perhaps drowned out the voices of thousands of the countrymen who gathered on nearby streets to question the very existence of the World Cup. Sport can be loud and colourful and we often give in to the noise and glitter for in it we become the blues or the kopites, the ones without the mundane problems of everyday life, a convenient identity to catch precious, if fleeting, moments of peace and happiness. But at some point we have to question if too much is being lost in the clamour.

The Brazilian government spent north of 11 billion dollars to host this world cup. That’s more money than was spent on the last 3 world cups combined. There were stadiums built which will perhaps never be full again, thousands of people evicted from their permanent homes to make way for temporary sporting facilities. Now, sport stripped of all the emotion and song is essentially business and business needs investment.

In Brazil however, it is the magnitude of investment and the circumstances around it that are alarming. About 16% of the country still lives in poverty; schools and hospitals are poorly equipped, offer sub-standard quality of service and basic infrastructure creeks under the weight of increasingly populated cities. It’s a country where there are a hundred better ways of using 11 billion dollars. The spirit of this world cup was captured perfectly when the 150,000 strong security force deployed to handle the World Cup was directed “to keep unsightly poverty out of the view of the coming international audience.” The sport which was once the poor man’s game is today being used to keep him in the darkness. The soul of football they say lives in Brazil, but in its greatest celebration they have undone everything that the sport has stood for in the country.

In the summer of 1978, as crucial matches of the World Cup were played out in the stadiums of Argentina, in nearby underground cells, innocent people were captured, tortured and eventually murdered. The ‘junta’ then ruling the country and accused of serious human rights violations was using the world cup as a smokescreen to divert focus away from the oppression of their regime and the failure of the country’s economy. The Berlin Olympics of 1936 were a sorry excuse to camouflage the racist, anti-semantic and militaristic regime of Adolf Hitler. The international community had a chance then to speak out against what would eventually become humanity’s most shameful period by boycotting the event, but overcome by the nationalistic emotions that sport evokes and fooled by Hitler’s supposed softened stance, they ended up mere props in his carefully crafted distraction.

Sport holds great power. Besides religion, there is perhaps nothing in the human society that can manipulate the masses as effectively as sport can. It arouses extreme and irrational nationalism, provides hope that doesn’t exist and distracts people away from the issues that need real attention. In one loud, glamorous event, governments switch the spotlight onto the success of 11 football players while they sweep their own failures under the rug, safely away from spotlight.

In Brazil, one has to wonder if the World Cup is an easy fix for underequipped hospitals, crowded schools and broken roads.

The irony isn’t lost on me that even as I write this article the World Cup tie between Belgium and Russia plays on on my TV screen in the background. That’s the lure of sport. The very people who weeks ago, took their days off to protest on the streets are today taking their days off to cheer in the stadiums. When the World Cup actually arrives, the anger fades away; agitation and disappointment give way to hope and assurance, a nation divided in protests, is united by football. The only problem is that the governments know it all too well. It’s like a terribly sad song with an incredibly catchy beat. You know that the lyrics talk of despair, but you dance to it anyway.

There isn’t much that can be done about the money that has already been spent on this world cup. The schools and roads that could have been aren’t going to be. The only thing that can be done is to hope that Brazil can go on and win the Cup, not because they play especially better football than the others, but so that the celebration and joy can go on for a little longer and they have a story to tell their grandchildren. That’s the least 11 billion dollars can buy.