Sport Clube do Recife, the only team from Pernambuco playing in the top division of national football, was having a poor season in the Brazilian Championship, finishing last in the table. That’s okay, after all, winning and losing is part of the game. It’s another defeat, off the field, that costs the people of Pernambuco more.
Contrary to what the famous film director Kleber Mendonça Filho from Pernambuco often advocates in his films and speeches, this damage is not caused by “bad guys from the south-east”. Pernambuco fans are suffering from complete neglect by the local authorities.
After ten years of living in Recife, I decided to go to Pernambuco Stadium to watch the Sport x Flamengo match. I have many friends from Pernambuco who have never been there before. Smartly, they left the joke to the gringo here. The experience couldn’t be worse. Not because of the match itself, which had some interesting moments, although Rio won 5-1. But for complete lack of respect towards the fans.
Arena Pernambuco is located in the municipality of São Lourenço da Mata, on the banks of the Capiparibe River, on the border between the municipalities of Recife, Jabuatao dos Guararapes and Camaragibe.
There is not even housing or work around the stadium. The dense forests and lack of light make the environment tense for any Brazilian, even those accustomed to daily urban violence. When it was built for the 2014 World Cup, there were plans to build a planned city around it, a promise that was not fulfilled by government officials. An inefficient giant has been created that does not serve the community of Pernambuco and is neglected by the employer state.
The Arena Pernambuco area is so isolated that cell phone internet is very poor. In the middle of 2025, complete nonsense. Even gate inspectors at the entrances, who needed to check each fan’s biometrics, struggled with signal drops. Inside the stadium, the screens did not work at any time, and we were left adrift to watch the defeat. This neglect did not come cheap. My ticket cost R$120.
But the worst happened off the field. There is no public transportation for the masses. Everyone has to go by car, and that is the road to chaos. Pernambuco Arena has a capacity of 44,300 people and 4,700 parking spaces. In other words, the bill is not closed without public transportation. A number of drivers parked their cars in the middle of the forest, in irregular parking lots.
The police there did not even try to regulate traffic. There were no lanes for application vehicles. There were no buses, subways or trains in the area. Everyone saved themselves as best they could.
If you haven’t driven your own car, like me, how do you call a car from an app in a place where the internet doesn’t work properly? After the match, hundreds of fans mourned around the stadium. It took me an hour to get out of the scary zone.
Of the total crowd of 19,706 fans in the arena, approximately 66% were Flamengo fans. Sports fans rarely attended, disappointed with the team and the board, who sold the match for R$3 million to a company that moved the match from the traditional Ilha do Retiro stadium to the away arena. The company, whose name was not disclosed, ended up losing, with net income from the match amounting to R$2.1 million.
In the face of this deficit, everyone lost. Companies, fans, teams and cities. When no one takes responsibility for regulating the flow of crowds, everything becomes a complete mess. What is surprising about the Pernambuco case is that it is not even possible to say that there was a failure in planning. There wasn’t even an attempt to plan anything.
Perhaps this is why the Pernambuco stadium is so little used. Nobody wants to go there. The travails of football in Pernambuco are emblematic of the worst legacy of the 2014 World Cup, with its “white elephants” and megalomaniac referees in Brasilia, in cities and states.
Ten years after the FIFA World Cup, we follow the fate of ineffective and incompetent governments from different ideological backgrounds, united in sabotaging football and Brazilian cities. Blaming the “evil south-easters” this time won’t work.
Current link: Did you like this text? Subscribers can access seven free accesses from any link per day. Just click on the blue letter F below.