Own goals

By Michael Reid

“GOOOOL! NEYMAAAAR!” That is the sound that 198m Brazilians will want to hear on the evening of July 13th, when the World Cup final is played in Rio de Janeiro’s Maracanã stadium. They will hope that home advantage and their young star forward, Neymar da Silva Santos Júnior, will help Brazil win the trophy for a record sixth time, though they will fear being pipped by Germany or, worse, arch-rivals Argentina. (The too-clever-by-half money is on Belgium, whose talented team will be overwhelmed by the occasion.)

One of the 79,000 fans in the Maracanã will be inwardly cheering for a second outcome: Dilma Rousseff, Brazil’s president, will hope to get through the tournament without being jeered. In 2007, when Brazil bid to stage the cup for the first time since 1950 (the year it lost to Uruguay in the final, a national humiliation), the economy was riding a commodity boom. Now it is stagnant and the country’s mood has changed. The $3.2 billion spent on building or refurbishing 12 stadiums, fitted to the expensive standards of FIFA, world football’s discredited governing body, seemed like a provocation. Germany did the job for half the cost in 2006. The Confederations Cup, a warm-up tournament held in June 2013, became a target of the largest mass protests in Brazil in a generation, with demonstrators demanding “FIFA-standard” hospitals, schools and public transport, and anarchists clashing with riot police outside the stadiums.