Sport in Brazil... A Growing Investment Market

In recent years Brazil has become a very major player in all kinds of economic and investment activity, attracting both global and domestic interest on a massive scale. This is no more true than in the area of Sport, in all its many and varied manifestations.

To start with, there are two enormously important events coming up on the international scene which Brazil is hosting, The FIFA Football World Cup in 2014 and of course the Olympic Games two years later. The necessary years of preparation for both are now well under way, involving hundreds of thousands of people and the public and private investment in Brazil of enormous amounts of Dollars/Reias. To give some idea of the scale, these two events between them are set to generate investments of over US$ 80 Billion. This is a sum equivalent to four hundred dollars each for every man, woman and child in this nation of two hundred million. As well as all this, there is the overall 'background' of sporting enthusiasm in the Country.

For instance, by far the most popular activity is Football (Soccer). According to the respected 'Atlas do Esporte no Brasil (2007)' the game is actually played (not just watched) by over thirty millio
Brazilians, although of course at many different levels, not all of them highly organised! Given this background it's perhaps not surprising that Brazil has been, by far, the most successful nation ever in terms of the FIFA World Cup. The country has won the contest a total of five times, the last time as recently as 2002. This success inspires and feeds back into the thirty percent of the country's male population who play the game, not just watch it!

Other popular sports in the country are Volleyball, played by about fifteen million people plus of course swimming and table-tennis (ping pong) at about twelve million participants each. There are also a great many others, smaller but of growing interest, such as Rugby, which has been making noticeable strides in recent years. Women's football has achieved a presence too, though a disappointingly small one, largely due to cultural resistance, where soccer fans of both sexes continue to view the game as a 'man's' sport. One sport that hasn't caught on 'big-time' is Cricket, though it is played to some extent in communities with Caribbean links. It's also present among certain well-to-do British Commonwealth expatriates or their descendants; mostly these tend to exist in the larger of Brazil's coastal cities.

Apart from special international events, the 'economy of sports' in Brazil is set to increase to fifty billio
US Dollars per year by 2015. This surge means that the finances are almost doubling in less than a decade. A particularly lucrative aspect for this is the whole sector of sponsorship, media involvement and international agencies for marketing events and venues. In turn, this all works in a kind of 'virtuous circle' to publicise and develop even further the great interest already there. Sports of all kinds then are certainly an important area that people should consider when committing to invest In Brazil and one of growing interest for those with funds to lodge, both domestic and international.