When Argentina and Uruguay announced years ago their joint candidacy to organize the 2030 World Cup, they promised to avoid some vices that complicate the region.
“These things must begin to be planned and raised in advance, because many times, due to not foreseeing and improvising, we have had problems throughout history,” said the then Argentine president Mauricio Macri in 2016 along with his Uruguayan counterpart Tabaré. Vazquez.
The idea seemed reasonable, at least from a historical perspective: In 2030, it will be 100 years since the first soccer World Cup, which had Uruguay as host and champion, and Argentina as vice-champion.
Other countries such as Paraguay and Chile later joined the 2030 project, which acquired overtones of a regional plan.
But soccer authorities surprisingly announced on Wednesday that Uruguay, Argentina and Paraguay will host only the first three games of the 2030 World Cup, which will then play out to the end in Spain, Portugal and Morocco.
According to that decision – to be ratified by a FIFA congress next year – 101 of the 104 matches of the centenary cup will be played in the three countries that competed with the South Americans to organize the global football festival.
While South American rulers and soccer officials presented this as a cause for celebration, others saw it as a strange departure from tradition. AND Some said it was a slap in the face to the region’s World Cup dreams..
“This is a failure: 10 years ago Brazil was the host and now there is no South American representative in FIFA capable of returning the tournament to its spiritual home,” Christopher Gaffney, a geographer and associate professor at the University of New York that has studied the impact of the World Cups.
The issue goes beyond the weight of South America in the governance of international football and may reflect something very different from what the region intended when it launched its candidacy.
The meaning of 1930
The celebration of the first World Cup in 1930 materialized an idea that arose almost with the founding of FIFA in 1904 and that dragged on over time due to lack of institutional weight and resources.
The choice of Uruguay as the first host city was in recognition of its triumph in the 1924 and 1928 Olympic football tournaments, organized by FIFA.
But for the South American country, which in the previous decades had achieved important social and economic advances, it was also an opportunity to show its organizational capacity to a world that was suffering the first effects of the Great Depression and still had fresh memories of the Great War. .
In fact, the Uruguayan Parliament and government approved subsidizing the organization of the first World Cup with public funds.
“The prestige of Uruguayan football and the offer to cover the travel and accommodation expenses of the visiting delegations turned FIFA in favor of Montevideo, leaving aside the European candidacies,” explains journalist Luis Prats in his book “La Crónica Celeste.” ” about the history of the Uruguayan national team.
That meant building the Centenario stadium in just one year (named because it was a century since the swearing in of the first Uruguayan Constitution of 1830) with capacity for nearly 80,000 spectators, which was something extraordinary.
Some veterans of the time used to remember that the workers who built that temple of football, many of them immigrants, competed to lay the most bricks in a day.
“The beautiful things”
As soon as it became known that his country would host an opening match of the 2030 World Cup, the Uruguayan president, Luis Lacalle Pou, celebrated the news on his X account, formerly called Twitter.
“’Uruguayan champions’! 100 years later, Uruguay and our Centennial will be the center of the world’s attention to experience the inauguration of the #MundialCentenario 2030. This recognition does justice to those pioneers who built the history of football! Thank you!” wrote Lacalle Pou.
Alejandro Domínguez, the president of the South American Football Confederation (Conmebol) who revealed the news in anticipation of FIFA itself, celebrated with a dance on social networks.
“It’s not just three games; There are three inaugurations that are going to take place in these headquarters, in these countries, and also all the previous celebrations,” Domínguez said at a press conference.
But his comment exposed the contrast between the way the first World Cup was approached and how they project the 2030 World Cup in a region burdened by economic problems, violence, corruption and lack of infrastructure.
“This is a project that demands a lot. However, the good thing is that by having three countries, three headquarters, we are talking about almost no investment other than what already exists,” he said.
“And that is very good news because we know that in that context, unfortunately, we are not able to compete if this had been a question of investments or demands for money,” he added. “So, let’s look for the pretty things.”
At his side, Claudio Tapia, president of the Argentine Football Association (AFA), alluded to the “difficult moment that his country is experiencing above all,” where the poverty rate is 40% and annual inflation reached 124% in August.
This being the case, the granting of the first three games of the 2030 World Cup to the South American countries seemed more like a consolation than a recognition comparable to that of 1930.
And Chile did not even keep that consolation; The exclusion of her without compelling reasons caused discomfort in that country.
“Who pays?”
FIFA president Gianni Infantino described the 2030 World Cup decision as a gesture of unity “in a divided world.”
“In 2030, we will have a unique global footprint, three continents – Africa, Europe and South America -, six countries – Argentina, Spain, Morocco, Paraguay, Portugal and Uruguay – welcoming and uniting the world as we celebrate together this beautiful game, the centenary and the FIFA World Cup,” he noted.
But several criticized this because they understood that it deviates too much from the tradition of holding the world championships in a single country or region and that it further distorts a competition whose participants will increase to a record of 48 in the next edition of 2026, to be held in Mexico, Canada. and the United States.
José Luis Chilavert, former goalkeeper of the Paraguayan national team, recalled that this decision arose after Conmebol took the final of the Libertadores Cup – its highest club tournament – in 2018 between the Argentine Boca and River to Spain, after the violent incidents that occurred. in Buenos Aires.
“Total failure, South America deserves respect and the World Cup should be in Uruguay,” tweeted Chilavert, a staunch critic of Domínguez.
Although the president of Conmebol assured that the three 2030 World Cup matches in South America will require “almost” no investment, some experts warn that the costs for countries can be high for just 90 minutes of play.
“With the arrival of FIFA comes a series of demands, sporting and urban, political and economic, social and cultural. As Brazil saw in 2014, beloved and historic stadiums are sanitized, prepared for the spectacle of global consumption. Who pays the bill? Local taxpayers,” Gaffney says.
In his opinion, the fact that South America has lost the opportunity to organize the entire tournament shows that the European market, which brings together the best soccer players on the planet in its clubs, is the main source of influence and profits for FIFA.
“South America is the region that produces raw materials,” he reflects, “but they are only exhibited in Europe.”
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BBC-NEWS-SRC: https://www.bbc.com/mundo/articles/c72k70k0r57o, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-10-05 10:50:07
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