Brazil is racing the clock

concession sales, and ticket package schemes will emerge as this innovation becomes more available. But it may be exactly the shot in the arm needed to boost the sagging attendance figures being experienced by many teams and in many sports.Greed, Greenwashing and Brazil's Hail Mary for a Green World Cup. In Brazil, where futebol fanaticism is only matched by the extraordinary lengths the game’s leaders will go to steal money, two young Brazilians are chasing down a different kind of green. Construction delays and corruption charges be damned if Ian McKee and Vicente Mello have their way, World Cup 2014 will go down as the first Green Cup in history. McKee and Mello are on a mission to build FIFA Coin the world’s first LEED Platinum soccer stadium the highest standard of sustainable building on the planet and they want to take the rest of Brazil’s stadiums with them. The pursuit of a Green Cup is unprecedented in the sports world, but downright audacious given the state of affairs in Brazil. A country prone to flamboyant demonstrations of national pride they also hold the year record for the World’s Largest Floating Christmas Tree, sixteen years running Brazil is racing the clock to raise no less than a dozen new stadiums for the 2014 Games, in host cities as far-flung as the capital of the Amazons and a Bolivian border town with no soccer team. It’s beenconstruction delays,runaway budgets,illegal evictions,erupting manhole covers and collapsing buildings ever since. Add in some striking policemen andconstruction workers and a fewpress-worthy catfights with FIFA andyou have the makings of a good old-fashioned telenovela. The drama started this fall with back-to-back corruption charges against the three most powerful men in Brazilian soccer. First to fall: Brazil’s Sports Minister, one of no less than eight federal cabinet members to resign in scandal since President Dilma Rousseff took office and started cleaning house. Then, two months later, International Olympics Committee (IOC) executive board member Jo atilde;o Havelange resigns from his post in the wake of allegations he took millions in kickback payments during his reign as FIFA’s former president. Peanuts compared to Havelange’s son-in-law, Ricardo Teixeira, El Presidente of Brazilian soccer, rumored heir apparent to the FIFA throne and shot-caller for the 2014 games. Teixeira is the Hans Gruber of our story, sipping champagne and shopping for fur in Zurich while a neverending story of corruption charges explodes around him. Teixeira was last seen hopping a private jet to Palm Beach when anew hotel booking scam hit the papers. He resurfaced a week later to update the official World Cup website after FIFA head Jerome Valcke told the press Brazil needed a “kick up the ass.”