Pkv Games Online is the year for Brazil
Governments sell Olympics and World Cups to their doubters with the carrot of glistening new infrastructure, but in Brazil’s case the promised new airports, roads and rail links have not arrived. At the same time, the cost of the as yet unfinished stadia has jumped to a staggering three times that of South Africa in 2010.
By last year, it was clear frustration was about to spill over, and it did, across the nation. 60,000 people demonstrated in Belo Horizonte alone, one of this summer’s host cities.
Who needs expensive new sports arenas when the people do not have proper schools or hospitals, ran the incontestable logic of the movement.
President Dilma Roussef has struggled to maintain authority as a doubling of income per capita and the lifting of 20 million out of poverty over the last decade have led to spiralling expectations for faster change.
The anger is somewhat middle-class driven. The lives of the rich elite have remained cocooned while some of the poor have seen their lives bettered. But the rest of the population is demanding to know why they are paying European levels of tax without concomitant European standards of living.
A month of football will make everyone happy, especially if the home team lift the cup, but Brazilians are itching for real progress, not temporary parties.
The government and FIFA are expecting more unrest this summer, but praying the nation’s love of football will stop it from disrupting the nation’s big night on the world stage.
On paper Brazil should already be a superpower: 200 million citizens, a quarter of the world’s arable land, plentiful oil and biofuels, and no enemies to threaten it.
But a ragged history of colonialism, pkv games online slavery and military dictatorships have held back this sleeping giant for decades.
Independent from Portugal since 1889, Brazil went backwards in the second half of the twentieth century following a military coup d’état in 1964.
Rapid growth soon led to economic ruin, censorship, torture, political murders and rampant inequality.
Democracy returned in 1990, which makes Brazil a young nation at heart. 2014 does offer Brazil a unique chance to promote itself, as the last World Cup Final was watched by an estimated 700 million people.
And it needs more tourist dollars. For all its attractiveness, Brazil barely ranks in the top 50 most-visited countries on earth, attracting almost half the amount of overseas tourists who visit Morocco, for instance. Crime if often cited as the explanation.
Yet if anything can take Brazilians’ minds off their problems it is football. While other countries have wars, artists, Nobel Prizes and scientific inventions to celebrate, Brazil can point to its five World Cups as its greatest achievements. Football has allowed a nation with weaknesses to dream it is beating all others with ease.
The adjective Brazilian has also become synonymous in football with flair and breathtaking skill, a world away from the muscular northern European sport Englishman Charles Miller brought to Sao Paolo, like a missionary, in 1894. It feels like Brazilians play football to an instinctive samba rhythm and the phrase sexy football could have been coined for them.
Football is such a potent uniter of a divided nation, a social equaliser bar none, that although there will be protests again in June, they won’t be happening while the green and gold of the seleçao are playing.
The game’s potential for manipulation has not been lost on politicians, who have tried to ally themselves to the nation’s favourite pastime for years. President Roussef is only the latest leader to schedule the general election in a World Cup year. If Brazil wins, she will surely reap some benefit in November.
Home advantage and a soccer-mad population means Brazil are the clear favourite for the World Cup, so elimination is unthinkable. But at the back of everyone’s mind lurks the trauma of 1950, the last time Brazil hosted the World Cup.
On the 16th of July 64 years ago, 174,000 packed Rio’s Maracana stadium and millions more listened on the airwaves expecting Brazil to overwhelm Uruguay in the World Cup Final.
Brazil took the lead but Uruguay equalised and then won thanks to a late goal from Alcides Ghiggia, a name which still unnerves Brazilians to this day. A nation was distraught and some fans even committed suicide.