A year after hosting the World Cup, Brazil is still trying to recover its loses after building and refurbishing 12 stadiums for the sports event. As the country is set to host the Summer Olympics in 2016, NPR has looked into the state of the mega-billion stadiums and discovered that many of these have been turned into nothing but parking lots and idle spaces.
Buses have made the most expensive World Cup stadium in Brasilia as its terminal, while the stadium located in Cuiaba has become a shelter for the homeless. It was also the first to be shut down due to faulty construction. The Natal stadium, on the other hand, has been turned into an events place, where weddings and birthday parties are hosted from time to time. But its operators are giving up on it as well, as the cash flow isn't worth it.
The sites are seeking private investors to take over, as maintenance has been a drain on the city's funds, added the NPR report.
Apart from Brazil's current economic woes, a local sports reporter told NPR that the stadiums have been unprofitable because they were built in places where there are "no strong local football teams."
"The local league games have very low attendance, and it costs a lot of money to put games on at the arena. So, in Manaus nowadays, local team matches actually take place in two training centers, and not in the World Cup stadium," Leânderson Lima said.
However, the stadiums were apparently built in these cities so that last year's World Cup games could be watched across the country and not just in the southeast where the pros are, according to a report from Vox.
"I don't see any World Cup legacy to Brazil except the debts we have inherited and the problems we now have," Jose Cruz, another local sports writer, said in a report from Think Progress. "The World Cup is over; we are suffering with everything that came after."
Brazil is now in the midst of renovating a stadium in Rio De Janeiro for the 2016 Summer Olympics. The cost of this project, as per the Vox report, is $13.2 billion.
