Brazil spent about $3 billion building 12 new or heavily refurbished stadiums for last year's World Cup. Officials promised these taxpayer-funded venues would continue to generate revenue for years, hosting concerts, pro soccer games, and other events.

But as Lourdes Garcia-Navarro at NPR reports, most stadiums are failing to generate much revenue at all. The most expensive one, in Brasilia, is most regularly used as a site for a municipal bus parking lot.

One big problem is that several of the stadiums — including Brasilia's 72,000-seat, $900 million venue — were built in cities where there are only minor league pro teams that don't draw large crowds. This was done so World Cup games could be spread across the entire country, instead of just the southeast, where most of the top pro teams play. It's as if we built gleaming new stadiums in Montana and Alaska for hosting a World Cup in the US.

In Brazil, this plan has left some pretty useless, expensive facilities scattered across the country, because these minor local teams don't sell enough tickets to make playing in the fancy (and expensive-to-maintain) stadiums worthwhile. The rainforest city of Manaus, for instance, is home to a $600 million stadium that was used for exactly four World Cup games. The pro team there currently plays in much smaller training centers, because it'd lose money if it tried to rent out the big stadium.

Many cities have been selling the stadiums to private companies that try to squeeze a bit of revenue out of them, but it's not easy. In Natal, the NPR story reports, a company bought the stadium, but has made little money renting it out for children's birthday parties and weddings, and the facility is now for sale once again.


What makes all this even more infuriating is that in many of these cities, hundreds of thousands of people were displaced from neighborhoods that were torn down to make way for these stadiums. And even though the World Cup was partly billed as a way to upgrade Brazil's overall infrastructure, several of the big projects — such as light-rail systems in São Paulo, Cuiaba, and Fortaleza — still aren't close to being finished.

Of course, the most insane part about all this is that for Brazil, the World Cup was just a prelude to an even bigger waste of public money on sports: the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. Though a stadium renovated for the World Cup will be reused for the games, the country will still spend a projected $13.2 billion on other facilities and infrastructure, a number that's likely to continue climbing as the games approach.

There are economists who study the potential economic impact of these events on the cities that host them, and their findings are unequivocal: they don't pay. As Victor Matheson, an economist at College of the Holy Cross, told my colleague Brad Plumer, "My basic takeaway for any city considering a bid for the Olympics is to run away like crazy."

I'd like to think Australia wouldn't be quite so wasteful, but maybe I'm being over optimistic. Reading this article, I'm kinda glad we didn't get the WC

Qatar will be like this. Russia I doubt this will happen.

Qatar plan to dismantle a lot of their stadiums after the world cup

Edited by ricecrackers: 16/5/2015 02:44:47 PM

stop building new stuff for the sake of one-off events FFS!

Just use whats there

There is a thing called a white elephant!

Its not like this is Ancient Greece, the Pyramids or ancient Rome we're talking about here, its just something for a couple of weeks, a couple of weeks is nothing in comparison to the... rest of time

[/curmudgeonly]

So they say

But as Lourdes Garcia-Navarro at NPR reports, most stadiums are failing to generate much revenue at all. The most expensive one, in Brasilia, is most regularly used as a site for a municipal bus parking lot.

so there are a lot of asian national teams playing there then??

the whole point of these events is to provide income for builders, contractors, investors, banks etc at the expense of the nation unlucky enough to secure the event

that's why Qatar and Russia were chosen because they provided the greatest opportunity for profit for foreign investors

you seem to be under the impression its about the sport :lol:

Giving these world cup to 3rd world/"Emerging economies" has been nothing else but a disaster.