~~June 18, 2014~~
2014 FIFA World Cup
The 2014 FIFA World Cup is the 20th FIFA World Cup, a tournament for the men’s football world championship, that is currently taking place in Brazil.
It began on 12 June, with a group stage, and is scheduled to conclude on 13 July with the final. It is the second time that Brazil has hosted the competition, the first being in 1950. Brazil was elected unchallenged as host nation in 2007 after the international football federation, FIFA, decreed that the tournament would be staged in South America for the first time since 1978 in Argentina, and the fifth time overall.
The national teams of 31 countries advanced through qualification competitions that began in June 2011 to participate with the host nation Brazil in the final tournament. A total of 64 matches are being played in 12 cities across Brazil in either new or redeveloped stadiums. For the first time at a World Cup finals, match officials are using goal-line technology, as well as vanishing foam for free kicks.
With the host country, all world champion teams since the first World Cup in 1930: Argentina, England, France, Germany (who won three times as West Germany), Italy, Spain and Uruguay, have qualified for this competition. Spain is the defending champion, having defeated the Netherlands 1–0 in the 2010 final to win its first World Cup.
All previous four World Cup tournaments staged in South America were won by South American teams.
~~THE PRICE OF THE WORLD CUP~~
As the world’s biggest sporting circus takes place, here’s Mikkel Keldof’s hard-hitting documentary The Price of the World Cup.
The film offers a slice of the other reality in Brazil, the reality that neither FIFA nor the Brazilian authorities want global viewers — whether football fans or not — to see.
What’s the Human Cost of the World Cup?
By: Nash Riggins
We all know entertainment comes at a hefty price – but where the world’s favorite sport is concerned, that price may now be too much to bear.
For decades, governments of all shapes and sizes have bent over backwards to accommodate the globe’s top sporting event. You can hardly blame them. With every TV on the planet tuned in, the Fifa World Cup is a chance for regimes to demonstrate feats of astounding infrastructural ingenuity – building works of engineering that far surpass the darkest depths of our imaginations. Yet in this race to produce the ground-breaking, state-of-the-art facilities that our well-paid sports personalities have come to expect, nations are literally working people to death.
Throughout the last six months, millions of Brazilians have taken to the streets in order to protest their government’s decision to prioritize the billion-dollar needs of FIFA and its single-serving stadiums over the welfare of everyday people. Officials are already running ridiculously over the tournament’s projected $13 billion budget, and are apparently more than happy to ignore the government’s criminal underspend on basic health and education for those most in need. Meanwhile, poor working conditions and vast organizational oversights have led to an influx of distressed workers that have yet to see their first paycheck. Several months ago, two of those laborers ended up dead.
Yet the sheer volume of Brazil’s catastrophically poor handling of what should be its finest hour has been dwarfed by the human rights calamity being casually swept under the rug in Qatar.
Over the course of the last year, 185 underpaid migrant workers died whilst laboring to construct over-the-top stadiums in Doha – where Qatar is set to host Fifa’s 2022 World Cup. There, illiterate expats from across Southeast Asia are quite literally being pushed to the breaking point, working day in and day out in one of the globe’s most unforgiving climates. Thousands of these impoverished workers are hauled from site to site like cattle, and crammed into over-crowded accommodation that’s often bereft of running water.
This needs to stop.
Shameless profiteering and delusions of grandeur have tarnished Fifa’s charitable reputation and bloodied the legacy of what was once a beautiful game. Consequently, it’s time to implement some serious sanctions and act against these blatant human rights violations before more lives are lost.
No game is worth this – and if the developed world continues to sit idly by as out-of-touch governments are pressured into working impoverished foreigners to death, it’s hard to say what kind of future is in store for the world’s favorite sport.
~~FULL READ/CREDIT/SOURCE~~
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/nash-riggins/world-cup-human-cost_b_4665614.html?just_reloaded=1
~~LINK TO QATAR~~
~~SOURCES~~
http://thefreeonline.wordpress.com/2014/06/14/the-price-of-the-world-cup/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_FIFA_World_Cup
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