Countdown to the Football World Cup in Brazil!

Football fans

Click HERE if you want to learn soccer jargon!

The 20th FIFA World Cup will be held in Brazil from 12 June to 13 July 2014. It is an international men's football tournament held every four years.

It will be the second time that Brazil has hosted the competition, the previous being in 1950. This is the fifth time the tournament will be staged in South America.

A total of 64 matches are to be played in twelve cities across Brazil in either new or redeveloped stadiums.

Spain is the defending champion, having won its first world title by defeating the Netherlands 1–0 in the 2010 final.

Click HERE to watch a BBC video on Nelson Paviotti!

Football ("soccer" in American) sometimes brings out the best in people. Nelson Paviotti, who is a lawyer, lives in Campinas, Sao Paulo. He is the biggest fan of his national team: Brazil. For the past twenty years, he has only worn outfits consisting of the colours of the Brazilian national flag because he promised to only wear these colours if Brazil won the world cup in 1994. He has of course decorated his home especially for the upcoming 2014 World Cup in Brazil…

Questions:

1. What do you think of Nelson’s fanaticism?
2. Which national team do you support and which nation do you think will win the 2014 World Cup?
3. How big a sports fan are YOU?!

Assignment 1:

Give a one-minute oral presentation on an aspect of Brazil that really interests you (its history, geography, social mix, leading figures, religious practices, customs, sporting legends, or recent social unrest, etc.).

Assignment 2:

Write a comment to this blog giving your World Cup predictions.

Assignment 3:

Write a comment to this blog giving your opinion of the 2014 World Cup (matches, players, results, supporters, organization, etc.).

Sport for all?

 

Within the next three years, Brazil will host two major events: the FIFA World Cup in 2014 and the Rio Olympic Games in 2016. This shows that Brazil has truly become an emerging nation. It now has the strongest economy in Latin America, and the world’s seventh. It will probably become one of the five largest in the world in the decades to come. Its current GDP per inhabitant is $10,200 which puts Brazil in 64th position according to World Bank data.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-19249588

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-19206308

However, since 2010, according to the United Nations, more than 10,000 slum-dwelling families have been displaced because of the upcoming events. The slums are simply razed to the ground to make room for parking lots, the Olympic village, media centers, etc. Some people have been relocated, but only in cities dozens of kilometers from their place of work. The political leaders of Rio believe that "these slums devalue the city, causing esthetic and environmental damage". Since Eduardo Paes, the mayor of Rio, brought back the Olympic flag from London, Brazil has become the focus of the world’s attention. Paes is hoping the Olympics will help get him reelected. None of the evicted residents of the favelas, none of whom can even afford the ticket prices for the Olympics, is likely to vote for him…

Article by Pierre Laubry and Maxence Houdelot