FOOTBALL IS COMING HOME » stadiums

Juventus Stadium: Changing Calcio

Peter Alegi — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 15:13:44 +0000

Although I was born and raised in Rome, I support Juve. My choice was based on the need to find a club that could compete with AC Milan and Inter, my older brothers’ favorite teams. I was barely six years old when I first saw Juve play. It was in Perugia (my father’s team) and “we” somehow lost 0-1 thanks to a goal by Renato Curi. As a result, Torino won the scudetto. What a tragedy! But the real tragedy happened a year later when I returned to Perugia hoping for a better Juve performance: Curi collapsed on the pitch and died of a heart attack. Talk about putting things in perspective.

Over the next decade, I watched Juve “under cover” at the Olimpico against Roma and Lazio, and in other cities as well. It could be dangerous. At Marassi stadium, for instance, Genoa’s ultras invaded our curva (end) wielding broken bottles. When all was said and done, a guy two rows in front of me was oozing blood from a stab wound in his leg. Surely it would have been safer in Turin, but as a young teenager living more than 400 miles away it was tough to make the pilgrimage to the Stadio Comunale. And after I moved to the United States in the mid-1980s, it seemed as if I had been sentenced to never attend a Juve “home” match. A victim of contrappasso for my act of betrayal of Roma and Lazio?

The inauguration of Juve’s new stadium is inspiring me to finally make the journey to Turin.

September 8, 2011, heralds the arrival of a new era in Italian football, or calcio as we call it. Juve’s friendly against Notts County — the club responsible for the Old Lady’s adoption of black-and-white kits — marks the first time an Italian club will play in its privately owned stadium.

It is a welcoming football-specific stadium: no track, no moat, no fence. It has a capacity of 41,000 seats and a design similar to many English Premier League grounds. Juve’s stadium provides a long-awaited alternative to overpriced, under-serviced, militarized, and outdated grounds found all over the peninsula. It rises on the ashes of its cursed predecessor, the Delle Alpi. Built on the outskirts of Turin for the 1990 World Cup, Delle Alpi stadium was twice as expensive as originally planned, featured terrible sight lines (largely due to a never-used running track), a bumpy playing surface, and abominably high maintenance costs. In 2003 Juve took it over from the city under a 99-year lease and demolition started in 2008. In the meantime, both Juve and Torino relocated to the downsized ex-Comunale stadium, renamed Olimpico after hosting the inaugural and closing ceremonies for the 2006 Winter Olympics.

Looking at the calendar, I could make the Piedmont derby between Juve and Novara on December 18 . . .

For a virtual tour of the new stadium click here. For videos documenting the construction process go here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

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Artificial Clouds for Qatar 2022

Peter Alegi — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 12:52:41 +0000

Saud Abdul Ghani, head of the Mechanical Engineering department at the University of Qatar, recently unveiled a special plan for the 2022 World Cup: remote-controlled artificial clouds over the stadiums!

Powered by four solar engines, the man-made clouds would be made of ultra light carbon fiber in an attempt to bring some relief to fans in the stands and players on the field from temperatures expected to reach 122 degrees Fahrenheit (50 Celsius) during the Qatari summer. The cost of this Addams family trick? $500,000.

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Cape Town Stadium: Socializing Debt, Privatizing Profits

Peter Alegi — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 07:29:12 +0000

http://www.mg.co.za/zapiro/fullcartoon/2932

The stadium operator SAIL STADEFRANCE announced yesterday that it is pulling out of the 30-year lease agreement with the City of Cape Town to manage the 4.5 billion rand ($600 million) World Cup stadium at Green Point.

SAIL chairman Morne du Plessis explained that “Shareholders were not prepared to enter the lease under circumstances that projected substantial losses.” Since PSL matches in Cape Town rarely draw more than a few thousand spectators, and rugby already has an excellent stadium at Newlands, local taxpayers must now shoulder the World Cup debt burden long into the future.

For further reading, see my academic journal articles from 2007 and 2008 (free download), in which I argued that in the long run the monumental Cape Town Stadium — built at FIFA’s insistence — would not benefit South African football, but instead would privatize profits (construction companies anyone?) and socialize debt.

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Worldview: SA 2010 (radio)

Peter Alegi — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 19:01:22 +0000

Did an interview on the ‘Worldview’ program of Chicago Public Radio station WBEZ. Interviewers Euan Hauge and Dan Shalin asked me what’s happening in SA at the moment? What are people talking about? Is the 2010 World Cup a case of the rich getting richer? What about forced removals disguised as urban renewal and the Nelspruit stadium mess? Is this really Africa’s World Cup? How will the African teams do in the tournament?

Listen to the interview here: http://audio.wbez.org/wv/2010/06/wv_20100604.mp3

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Radio Debate: Africa’s First World Cup

Peter Alegi — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 12:00:29 +0000

Radio France International’s Brent Gregston invited me to discuss Africa’s First World Cup on his ‘Crossrads Debate’ program. ‘Billions of people will see the football World Cup played out in glittering new stadiums built by the rainbow nation of South Africa. But few black Africans can afford to book a seat. Will the continent’s first World Cup be a unifying force in Africa? And how much does the feel-good factor depend on the performance of South African footballers?’

Click here to listen to the program.

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Who will benefit from 2010?

Sean Jacobs — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 16:17:27 +0000

Just as the football at the 2010 World Cup will be great, someone will make lots of money. It is not going to be local businesses for sure. This excellent 13 minute short documentary (“Trademark 2010″) for Dutch TV channel, VPRO, covers the fantasy that local people–small businesspeople, informal traders–will make money or get jobs during the tournament.

Mainly filmed in Cape Town, the tightly structured short film consists of interviews with, among others, a young informal tour operator (who wants to corner the visiting Spanish-speaking market), a construction worker at the stadium (who contemplates the fact that he won’t have work after the stadium is completed), a former sports administrator (who laments FIFA’s greed), the leader of informal traders in downtown Cape Town (who will be prevented from trading during the World Cup), sociologist Ari Sitas and Eddie Cottle of the group Campaign for Decent Work 2010. And there’s the city official who sells jargon.

Only question: Why does the film end by legitimizing former councilor, Arthur Weinburg, who represents the Cape Town Environmental Protection Association–a front for rich whites in the neighborhood where the stadium is located and have no other reasons to oppose it other than it is being built in their neighborhood and not somewhere else?

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South Africa needs money to finish stadiums

Editor — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 13:37:35 +0000

From Reuters:

CAPE TOWN, Sept 17 (Reuters) – South Africa faces a funding shortfall of 2.3 billion rand ($315 million) for six new stadiums built for next year’s Soccer World Cup, Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan said on Thursday.
South Africa, in its first recession in 17 years, is the first African country to host the world’s most watched sports spectacle, starting next June.
“National Treasury has informed me of the projected shortfalls for the 2010 FIFA World Cup stadiums. The total shortfall on the six new stadiums is 2.33 billion rand as of July 2009,” Gordhan said in a written response to a question in parliament.
The funding shortfall comes on the back of accommodation, transport and security concerns raised by FIFA, soccer’s world governing body.
Gordhan said contractual responsibility rested with South Africa’s 10 host cities to deal with rising costs, and it would be “clearly unreasonable” for national government to take full responsibility for reimbursement of rising costs. “Only one of the new stadiums is likely to be completed within budget,” he said, without specifying which stadium. Soccer City, where the finals will be played in Johannesburg, accounted for almost half of the total shortfall at 1.26 billion rand, he said.

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What will happen in South Africa after the World Cup is over?

Editor — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 10:31:51 +0000

Christopher Merrett

Football is often described as the “beautiful game”. Indeed, it is. As Michael Worsnip pointed out recently (The Witness, June 12), football on the local recreation ground reduces the possibility that young people will be tempted into crime. And, of course, South Africa will host a successful Fifa World Cup next year — if it tries hard enough. All of this is obvious. But what is crucially missing from public debate are a number of awkward political, economic and social questions.

All international sports federations, including the Olympic movement, are now a significant component of globalisation. Run by overpaid bureaucrats accountable to no one, they oversee minor empires—as large as the economies of small countries—that sell sport as a commodity. It is all a far remove from the neighbourhood park. What is needed by this new form of colonialism is an acceptable level of infrastructure and a scenic backdrop, and that’s why South Africa was awarded the 2010 Soccer World Cup. Big businessmen will make a killing, politicians will have a platform on which to promote themselves and scores of already grotesquely rich footballers will have the opportunity to maximise their income.

South Africa is just a stage for this extravaganza. Its citizens are told that it will create jobs and lay the foundations of a booming tourist industry. Yes, it has helped the construction industry at a difficult time—stadia and hotels have mushroomed. But there is something obscene about Durban’s new stadium.

Named after one of the province’s most famous communists, it overlooks some of the world’s fastest-growing slums. Why should their residents buy the argument that Moses Mabhida Stadium is a better investment than houses, street lights and sanitation? In the rhetoric of the African National Congress this is a developmental state. Why are its resources not more effectively directed at improving the condition of the very poor; rather than offered on bended knee to the czars of international football?

The crucial year is not 2010, about which South Africans have been badgered endlessly — but 2011. After the 2004 Olympics, Athens was left with crumbling, redundant facilities. We shall have white elephant football stadia, to which the future viability has been given little thought. South Africans are football mad, but they generally avoid club matches in massive numbers. The signs are that rugby will be coerced into using the new stadia against its wishes. The construction of Cape Town’s Green Point Stadium was a colossal waste. Newlands could have been renovated, or a modest stadium built for the people of the Cape Flats. But a better view of Table Mountain was required by Fifa.

People like Sepp Blatter have set an agenda for South Africa to their own ends. After 2010 they will move on elsewhere, leaving a raft of unresolved problems. Is tourism the future for South Africa?

Globalisation destroyed the textile and footwear industries that provided lifetimes of work and brought stability to many communities. Now it gives back sightseers and tourism, a notoriously fragile industry. The fans who come to South Africa may well have a safe and secure trip. But this will require a new version of apartheid. South Africa is a place of violent and premature death—murder and road fatalities account for up to 30 000 fatalities, the population of a small town, every year. Visitors will need to stay away, or be protected, from the real South Africa.

Unprecedented resources will be thrown at shielding visitors—in effect altering the social geography of South Africa — and the rest of us will be more vulnerable than before. Hopefully it will work out successfully. But this will raise a further crucial question: why can we not make a similar go of the Department of Home Affairs, South African Airways, the Land Bank, Eskom and hospitals?

Or are they condoned failures, their dysfunctionality part of political infighting and a culture of plunder?

In effect, the World Cup marks the nationalisation of football: it is rapidly becoming the sports department of the ANC, an internationally sanctioned method of distracting attention from serious national shortcomings. Once the party is over, rugby will be put in its subordinate place, a not unwarranted fate: it was after all suffered by African football in the apartheid years. In the meantime, any questioning or criticism of the holy event will be labelled unpatriotic.

But this is politics, not sport; and it’s imperative to keep on probing and asking questions.

The very worst outcome would be an imposed national consensus that the World Cup is beyond criticism. And that is a very real danger.

This article first appeared in The Witness.

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