Experiencing Brazil

I’m finally back in a country which values the one and only really sport on earth: soccer!

As any real European, I love the Euro and World Cup! Although Switzerland was never particularly successful, luckily our neighbors around us can easily fill the gap. Nothing is better than a final between Germany or Italy. Or watching the Spanish team score one goal after the other.. Incredible!!

For my American friends: you don’t have to understand this passion 😉 Just imagine it would be American Football or maybe even better – Rose Bowl 😉

In order to understand the current status of the preparations, we met with the CEO of the local organizing committee. Because I worked at a large event as well (www.stgallen-symposium.org > 1’000 participants, 3 days.. although this is of course not even close to the size of the World Cup), I was naturally excited about this meeting.

But before we talk about the organization, let’s talk about “Fuleco” – the mascot.

(is it only me or has Ronaldo gained weight since he stopped playing soccer professionally?!)

Well.. so “Fuleco” is apparently a Three-banded Armadillo (>check out Wikipedia). It’s a special subspecies of Armadillos and only exists in Brazil. In addition to this fact, it also has the soccer related capability of rolling itself into a ball 😉

It’s a really weird but somehow cute animal 😉

I don’t really know what the name “Fuleco” means and Google Translate didn’t give me any answer either. However it was decided in an online voting among “Zuzeco” and “Amijubi”, so at least it has some democratic legitimation 😉

***

The meeting..

Who: Ricardo Trade (or as the real insiders call him “Ricci Trade” ;))

Key takeaways:

• Infrastructure needs: They have to balance short-term World Cup needs with real long-term demand. For example, in his view the holiday rule isn’t that bad because it helps coping with the short-term demand without building too much infrastructure.

  However, he acknowledges that it is a huge additional workload to have games in 12 cities instead of just a couple. However, this was a clear wish of the government in order to spread the benefits of the cup to more regions. But who needs a huge stadium in the middle of the Amazon?!

• Municipalities: The local government officially builds and runs the infrastructure, including the stadiums. So the relationship with them is key, because they have no direct power over them. They are a private club in the end.

• Privatization: Is strongly for privatized infrastructure, such as airports and roads, because they need efficient organizations who can deliver the promised performance and can be hold accountable.

• Knowledge transfer: The invited event managers from all over the world to teach them how to organize a successful event of this scale. A really smart move in my view! There are not many events of this size in the world. And at the same time, the fundamentals usually are the same. So I really value their openness of asking other people for their experience.

• FIFA: It seems that the relationship between FIFA and the organizing country is pretty clear: FIFA gets all the revenue and the country get all the cost 🙁 Seems like a really good business model.. at least for FIFA 😉

And of course the final question: Will Brazil be ready for the World Cup??

Of course, Mr. Trade was fully convinced that they will be ready in time. However, it will be a very close call 😉 But as usual in Brazil, everything will work out in the end 😉

When asked what his concerns are he said: “my only concern is the Brazilian soccer team ;)!”

So let’s keep our fingers crossed – for Brazil and of course the team 😉

Tags: Rio

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 15th, 2012 at 6:09 pm and is filed under Rio. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.