By Andrew Warshaw
January 28 – Brazil’s assistant coach Carlos Alberto Parreira has added his voice to growing concerns over delays in World Cup preparations, saying it’s “a joke” that it took so long to start work on some of the infrastructure projects and blasting the authorities for “total neglect”.
With less than five months to go before the tournament, Parreira, Brazil’s World Cup-winning coach in 1994, says a huge legacy opportunity is in danger of being be lost.
Only seven of the 12 World Cup stadiums are ready for the tournament that opens on June 12. But Parreira says a far greater worry concerns other infrastructure.
“We know the World Cup is about stadiums, but it’s not only about stadiums. Fans can’t live in a stadium,” Parreira said. “They say everything will eventually be ready in 2018, 2020… but we wanted it ready for the World Cup to try to change this view that the foreigners have about Brazil.”
“Everything was supposed to be ready for the World Cup, but it was a total neglect. I saw recently that they are going to start the bidding processes for (work at) airports in March, three months before the World Cup. It’s a joke. We won the bid seven years ago and it’s only now that they are starting these bidding processes.”
Brazil is now expected to spend a total of about $14 billion on the World Cup but lack of improvements to public services prompted another outbreak of street protests at the weekend, this time specifically about the cost of staging the tournament.
Last month FIFA president Sepp Blatter chided organisers for their slow progress.
Parreira said the government is mostly to blame.
“We missed an opportunity to show the world what we can do in this country,” he said in an interview published in Brazilian newspapers. “We missed an opportunity to provide more comfort to Brazilians and to show a different kind of Brazil.”
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