White Elephant

When it comes to hosting the FIFA (football) World Cup, countries are usually falling over themselves to own, as per this article by Ravi Dev, the white elephant. Hosting a World Cup is very expensive. For not so rich countries, the sums involved are enough “to completely transform a (host) country’s political and economic agenda”! Take “Brazil’s over-budget World Cup”, says Dev: it’s estimated to cost more than $13.5 billion, the most expensive World Cup till date. Now consider that Brazil is similar to India in terms of how well off it is, and you’d wonder whether that money would have been better spent on, I don’t know, roads or hospitals or schools?

Or consider the weird case of selecting Qatar as the venue for 2022. The estimates there would blow you away: $200 billion! Why the astronomical sum, you wonder? The venue for the final, Lusail, is a city that is yet to be built! No, not a typo: the city is going to be built for the World Cup and will cost $45 billion.

Why FIFA chose Qatar is even more strange given that World Cups are hosted in summer, when most of the professional leagues are off. But playing in the desert heat in summer? Is FIFA crazy? What were they thinking? In case you’re wondering, moving it to winter isn’t easy: the football leagues of England, Spain and every other European country would be up in arms protesting the clash with their schedules.

And some of FIFA’s demands (on any host country, not just Qatar) are just insane: like having 8 stadiums with 40,000 capacity. Does Qatar even have 320,000 citizens who want to watch football after the World Cup in those stadiums? What a colossal waste! Some of the stadiums of the 2010 host, South Africa, are still bleeding money.

If this is the case, why do countries still vie for the “honour” of playing host? I guess I am missing something, but I just can’t see what.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire ...
Read more

Why we Deceive Ourselves

In their book, The Elephant in the Brain , the authors describe this weird aspect of deception that we practice: deceiving ourselves! That is so weird: “If our minds contain maps of our worlds, what good comes from having an inaccurate version of these maps?” The Sigmund Freud school of thought treats self-deception as a defense mechanism, “a way for the ego to protect itself”. The mind seeks to protect itself from anxiety and other negative emotions. Many object to this reasoning: since accurate information is so critical to our survival, surely distorting information would be dangerous. Wouldn’t the goal of protecting our self-esteem have been better achieved by making the brain’s self-esteem mechanism stronger instead? The new school of thought explains self-deception as “primarily outward-facing, manipulative, and ultimately self-serving”. This is based on Thomas Schelling’s work on game theory: “In a variety of scenarios, limiting or sabotaging yourself is the winn...
Read more

Europe #3 - Innsbruck

The last city we visited in Europe was Innsbruck in the Austrian Alps. After the cold and windy experience (at times) of Paris and Netherlands, Innsbruck was a wonderful change – it didn’t feel that cold, it was not windy all of which made it easy to walk around. Something absolutely necessary given how scenic the place is.   Since the hotel check-in time was much later in the day, we left the baggage and went to the Swarovski HQ-cum-museum about an hour by bus from Innsbruck. The crystal exhibits were brilliant – colorful, bright, shiny. Jewellery aside, it was a display of what one can do with crystals. While my wife and daughter loved the jewellery, I liked the superhero themed exhibits of Batman, Spiderman, the Hulk, and Star Wars. We didn’t buy anything there, though we did buy stuff in the Swarovski store in Innsbruck – jewellery, not the superhero stuff.   Innsbruck is a major tourist attraction during the skiing season but now in summer, we saw many groups of ...
Read more