The 2014 anti-World Cup protests failed to stop the tournament
Evidence
This wasn’t supposed to happen. Well, at least not according to a meme that had been in the air (and graffitied onto walls) over the past twelve months. Não Vai Ter Copa, it declared. “There will be no World Cup.” A loose set of demonstrations, carried out with some of the same repertoire the MPL had used, insisted they would stop the tournament from happening, in protest of the lavish spending on stadiums like Itaquera. Over the previous year, the protests had continued, though they grew smaller and more radical in their tactics (“black bloc” participants were more common than yellow-and-green patriots), and lost the support of mainstream opinion over time. Brazil had prepared twelve stadiums in total, more than FIFA had asked for, even putting up new arenas in cities without major football teams. — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 529
Categorization
- XREF: The arc from MPL street triumph to shrinking radical protests parallels the later chapters’ recurring pattern of movement decline after mainstream support fades. — connects to: Brazil’s World Cup opened peacefully despite a year of anti-tournament protest; Massive anti-war protest failed to sustain opposition once US intervention began