Hosting the World Cup and the Olympics is meant to showcase a transformation: Brazil is attacking corruption
However, it does depend what you count as corruption. Brasília’s stadium will have 70,000 seats. After 2014, it will become a white elephant, because no local team draws even 5,000 spectators. Several other stadiums under construction are equally pointless, says the Danish pressure group Play The Game. This squandering of public money has been shrouded with falsehoods by Rousseff’s government. Brazil’s sports ministry has forecast an economic boost worth more than $70bn from the World Cup – a claim that almost every sports economist would dismiss. Surely misleading your population is a form of corruption too?
