World Cup fans in the stands are still mainly white and wealthy

World Cup fans

July 2 – A poll has found that the majority of fans attending the 2014 world cup games are white and wealthy. This might be surprising, seeing as Brazil is a racially diverse nation and has a higher population of blacks than all nations in the world excepting Nigeria, yet probably isn’t since we are used to this demographic being over represented at the world cup due to the costs of tickets, travel and accommodation.

The Datafolha polling group published an example of this from the Brazil vs Chile game.

67% of attendees were self-reportedly white, and 90% of attendees came from one of Brazil’s top two economic classes.

A contributing factor to these demographics is the 196,838 plane tickets that have been bought for travel from USA to Brazil.

A nation with vast monetary resources, and its relative proximity to the host nation, has the potential to skew the representation of race and class at the tournament.

To put this figure in context, the nation that has sold the second most amounts of plane tickets to Brazil, Argentina, managed less than a third than the USA, with 61,021.

Germany and England sold the third and fourth most plane tickets, which also boosts the proportion of wealthy, white persons present.

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