The world’s biggest sporting spectacle kicks off in Sao Paolo, Brazil, today, and it’s set to be unlike any previous iteration. The anticipation and pre-tournament hype buildup are firmly in place as they always are. Some 46 per cent of the global population — 3.2 billion people — watched at least part of the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. It’s a safe bet the figures this time around will match or exceed those. The talent is present and accounted for: Lionel Messi, looking to fill in the last blank in his resume and cement his place among the all-time greats; Cristiano Ronaldo with his potent mix of lithe genius and earned arrogance; Brazilian football’s golden boy Neymar, hoping to turn the tournament into a royal progress; Andres Iniesta, Luis Suarez, Andrea Pirlo, Sergio Aguero. But what makes this World Cup stand out — ironically so, given that if any country can claim to be spiritual home to the beautiful game, it’s Brazil — is the dichotomy between the global enthusiasm for it and football-crazy Brazilians’ apathy towards it.

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Even as it recedes from its 2013 high water mark, the tide of domestic discontent is leaving behind detritus that could embarrass Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff and her administration. The subway workers’ strike in Sao Paolo poses a real problem in a city expecting tens of thousands of football tourists. Last week, activists from the Homeless Workers Movement marched on the Sao Paolo stadium where the opening match will be played. May saw at least 10,000 people out on the streets protesting the World Cup. And before that, teachers went on strike in Rio de Janeiro, bus drivers in Sao Paolo and police officers in 14 states. 

The tipping point for the far larger countrywide protests that had erupted last year around the Confederations Cup was an increase in bus fares. But a deeper narrative soon emerged: widespread disappointment and anger with inadequate social services despite high tax rates with the global football tournaments serving as symbols of the government’s failure to deliver where it mattered. A Pew Research Center survey sums it up well, showing that 61 per cent of Brazilians think hosting the World Cup is a bad thing because it takes money away from public services.

Rousseff has protested that the expenditure on the tournament — some $11 billion — is miniscule compared to the government’s social sector spending over the past few years. She is correct but manages to still miss the point. The protests are not based on economic statistics; they are born out of the frustrated aspirations of a population that has been empowered enough by Brazil’s economic boom of the previous decade to expect and demand more. The current slowdown — the country is experiencing its fourth year of low growth — have brought structural weaknesses such as massive corruption and income inequality to the fore. The government’s missteps haven’t helped, ranging from police brutality in suppressing the riots and delays and cost overruns in World Cup projects to shelving plans for public infrastructure that had been packaged as part of the World Cup deal and evicting the poor from land near the stadiums. 

There is a chance that it will all be forgotten once the referee blows the whistle. The national team’s quest for World Cup glory before an adoring home crowd has the potential to provide a potent counter-narrative. But whatever the magic Neymar and his compatriots produce on the field, the 2014 World Cup has already sent out one message: not even the beautiful game can mask the increasingly dubious worth of developing nations hosting global sporting events.