All I learnt about morality and the obligation of men, I owe to football.

Albert Camus

 

When Brasilia was planned and inaugurated in the year 1960, the plans included th erection of a venue, which was supposed to attract huge crowds for the country’s number one sport: a football stadium. It was not just to be a simple stadium for a football tradition that did not exist in the newly founded city yet, no, it was meant to be one of the country’s biggest stadiums. Built in the year 1974, it was part of a multiuse sport complex and offered an original  capacity of 53 250 spectators, which was reduced to approximatly 45 200 afterwards. Named after one of Brazil’s all time football greats, Manoel Francisco dos Santos, also known as Mane Garrincha, it was expected to compete with another football temple, the famous Maracana Stadium in Rio de Janeiro. Estadio Mane Garrincha should become the new home of Brazil’s national team. But, it did not turn out to be like that.

The mighty, Rio based, Brazilian football federation, CBF, preferred to have their dobbin travelling around the country to play their qualifiers instead of having them based far away from Rio (it’s a two hours flight from Rio de Janeiro to Brasilia) in an utopical city. So it is not to be wondered about, that the record crowd of approximately 51 000 spectators dates from a National Championship Second Division league match (SE Gama vs. EC Londrina, 2nd division finals, 1998) and not from a match of the national team. The stadium was of no real use, was hardly used (the local clubs prefered to play in suburbian stadiums like Abadião in Ceilandia, Bezerrão in Gama, or Serejão in Taguatinga) to escape the high rental costs and the once pride of itself was starting to crumble. The capacity reduction was due to safety measurements and not because the interest of football was decreasing. The interest for the local teams was never really rooted in the Candango population. They prefer to support the big teams from other regions, especially from Rio de Janeiro.

Then came the World Cup 2014. Brazil, by that time five times winners of the holy grail of national team competitions, were still suffering from the Maracanaço from 1950, when they lost the deciding match (not the final, as the final phase was played as a group at this World Cup, it just happened that the decider was also the last match) 2-1 against Uruguay, which sent the country to a collective depression and caused a national trauma, which should last for years. But in the year 2014 everything should be different. Therefore the government took money in their hands and spent an incredible sum of over 10 billion Euros on the modernization and (re)building of stadia and infrastructure. That was money, which would be lacked at other projects, mainly in the educational, social and health sectors, which were favoured by the left government before, they had to face harsh cuts in their fundings due to the World Cup preperations.

Estadio Mane Garrincha was one of these stadiums which benefitted from the modernisation wave. Torn down completly in 2010 and entirely rebuilt until 2014, the stadium, now called Estadio Nacional Mane Garrincha, was turned into a modern all seater arena with a capacity of 71 400 seats, which was even further expanded to 72 788, after the World Cup 2014 was over. The gigantomaniac project finally had come to an end. But did that change the attitude of the population of Brasilia towards its local teams? No, it did not. Crowd figures of the state championship were still on a low, the local clubs were like nomads, as, except for Gama’s privately owned stadium, none of them had a home of their own and the Football Federation of Brasilia, FFDF, together with the Secretary of Sport and Recreation were liberating only a handful of the other small, partly also crumbling stadiums, to have the state championship matches being played in. Well, that is not entirely true. To be precise the clubs of Luziania, Formosa, Ceilandia, Taguatinga, Paracatu and Planaltina actually do have stadiums of their own – owned by their respective cities and therefore have to be shared or rented together with the others, who play in their divisions. So the real problem here lies with the clubs, which come from the city of Brasilia themselves, who would only have the Estadio Nacional – and playing a match of the First Division of the State Championship in front of a crowd of approximately 200 inside a 74 000 capacity stadium is more than just awkward. In Europe these matches are called “Matches behind closed Doors”, in Brasilia these seem to be regular league games with the doors wide open, but nobody wants to get in there.

Now the finals of the state championships are closing in for the year 2016, and the regulations of the competition say that both matches have to be played on neutral ground – with the Estadio Nacional Mane Garrincha being the only venue offering real neutrality. In the recent years that has never been a problem, but with the Olympic Games 2016 being held in Brazil, everything seems to be different. Without being noticed about that earlier, FFDF find themselves in a dead end street, as the Secretary of Sport and Recreation decided to close the unused stadium for several days in order to have it reopened three days after the first final of the state championship, in order to receive the olympic torch. The official given reason was that the pitch would not recuperate from the football use in such a short amount of time and the whole world would look at Brasilia for is special moment. That the pitch was in a bad condition ever since the contract with the pitch maintainance company had ended in January 2016, would be too much of a shameful confession of one’s own incompetence to maintain a five star stadium, which is hardly ever used, just generates costs and has no real rentability, neither directly nor indirectly. When it is used for concerts, then its parking lot in front of the stadium hosts these events and not, like in European or American cities, the stadium itself.  The stadium functions as an impressive stage scenery in the background, but that’s it. Well, it is, to speak freely after the Brazilian vice president Michel Temer, a “decorative element”, especially as it has a very interesting esthetic architecture outside, and a fine functioning infrastructure inside. Maybe the infrastructure is working that well, because it is hardly ever used. The future of this White Elephant remains unwritten yet, as nobody really knows what is going to happen. As Maracana is prepared to host the Olympics in August 2016, Rio’s clubs have to look for substitutional stadiums, Brasilia has a stadium but no interesting clubs. Maybe there is a deal for both of them in hand?