Manana in Brazil: Stuttering preparations for the World Cup

So much needs to be done in the next 18 months that FIFA and the Brazilian government must be privately sweating more than its national football squad. Most of the 12 stadiums are behind schedule to varying degrees, but should at least be finished on time. The big concern is everything else that the showcase of the world’s biggest game is expected to have as a matter of course.

There’s security. With ten murders a day in Sao Paolo alone, the security situation has actually worsened since 2007 when Brazil won the right to stage the World Cup. And that’s despite bland assurances from the authorities that they’re going to get on top of it with the aid of the military.

There’s the roads. Bottlenecks in Sao Paulo, the commercial capital, and in Rio de Janeiro are so bad that many businesspeople use helicopters to get from place to place. The city has more rooftop helipads than New York.

There’s the commercial airports. Although airports authority Infraero has known for nearly a decade that Brazil would be given the World Cup, it’s only just following up half-heartedly on a long-delayed promise to privatise the main airports to make them more efficient. After decades of under-investment most of the main airports in the regional capitals are chronically congested. At Sao Paulo passengers are advised to leave their hotels five hours before take-off.

Yet plans for a new terminal there have been dropped and a rail link from downtown is way behind schedule, as are other rail projects in other cities. A Brazilian think tank, the Institute for Research into Applied Economics, predicts that promised improvements to ten of the thirteen earmarked airports will not be done on time.

Given these delays, it’s hardly surprising that FIFA’s nerves are on edge. Earlier this year the football body’s secretary-general, France’s Jerome Valcke who bears much of the responsibility for getting the show on the road, said the Brazilians needed “a kick up the backside”. Although he rapidly backpedaled and claimed he really said (in French) that Brazil needed to “pick up the pace,” Valcke had summed up what many are saying inside as well as outside the country. Namely, there’s too much manana in Brazil.

An outraged government’s response however was to shoot the messenger, warning FIFA president Sepp Blatter that it would no longer deal with Valcke. In his latest column on FIFA’s website, a contrite Valcke acknowledged “very positively” the achievements made in the last few months.

But that’s not what Roberto Bernasconi, president of a leading association of architects and engineers, is saying. “There are countries which suffer natural disasters and need to reconstruct everything on an emergency basis. We create our own emergencies without any need to,” he wrote in sports publication Lance.

How did Brazil slip so far behind? One scapegoat among several is Ricardo Teixeira, long-standing kingmaker of Brazilian football as head of its association, the CBF, and also president of the World Cup organising committee. Although Teixeira was the architect of the grand plan to stage the event across 12 cities, for some reason he delayed for two disastrous years a decision over exactly which cities they would be. Eventually, FIFA had to step in and choose them.

Claiming health issues, Teixeira resigned abruptly in April this year and moved to the USA after it emerged he had accepted £8.4m [$13.4m] in payments from failed sports management group ISL. It had not helped preparations when sports minister Orlando Silva, who was coordinating plans for 2014, stepped down a few months earlier over allegations of corruption.

There are big question marks over the financing. Although most of the money was originally supposed to come from the private sector, nearly all of the official $12-14bn budget will be provided by state coffers. Yet, according to Bernasconi, only five per cent of the huge transport budget for the cities has actually been allocated.

You have to admire Brazil’s vision in staging a 12-city World Cup including some games in a remarkable new stadium in Manaus in the Amazon jungle. But if the authorities pull this off, they’ve only got another two years to get organised for the 2016 Olympics in Rio – and that’s a much tougher feat. While new sports minister Aldo Rebelo insists all the construction work will be completed on time – “we’ve achieved some crazy things over the centuries,” Brazil will need plenty of boa sorte.