Coen Lammers: It's a big, very big place

Hundreds of travelers watch the World Cup match between Germany and Ghana on a screen in the departure lobby at the airport in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Photo / AP

Opinion

Brazil is a very, very big place. As the group stages have reached their end, this has created some challenging dynamics for anyone being part of the Fifa World Cup circus.

So far fans, journalists and Fifa staff and others following the matches around this enormous country have spent much of their time at airports, bus stations and in taxis to get from game to game.

It has been especially hard on the supporters who want to follow one particular team because the schedule has put each team in three different corners of this continent-sized country.

You would almost suspect the airlines to have played a part in planning this event, as football tournaments of the past used to base the four teams of a group in adjacent cities.
This philosophy changed some years ago and airlines have been making a killing ever since.

Fifa's approach has sadly turned the World Cup into the playground for the wealthy, who have been able to make a calculated decision whether they wanted to fork out the additional thousands of dollars for domestic flights.

This week, however, things got even trickier for fans as the unpredictability of this tournament made it near impossible to book travel for the play-offs.

So now thousands of fans have tickets for their team's matches but struggle to get flights or drive thousands of kilometers across the country.

Dutch fan websites are overflowing with ticket offers from supporters in Sao Paulo or Rio who can't get to Fortaleza by Sunday for their match against Mexico. To put it in perspective, that trip is roughly the same as Sydney to Darwin, and few people realised that Brazil is the fifth largest country in the world, bigger than Australia and only smaller than Russia, Canada, China and the United States.

Some Dutch hardcore fans have decided to bite the bullet and fork out a king's ransom for the four-hour flight.

In other cases the fans can still cancel your ticket, but Fifa charges a $NZ60 cancellation fine per ticket. The same fine applies for fans that had booked tickets for teams that were eliminated.

If you try to calculate the number of supporters from the 16 eliminated countries who had pre-booked times $60, the figure is mind-boggling.

One fan said he had tickets booked for the final - at $1700 a pop - but now even hoped his side would not make it.

And no guessing who's laughing at the end of this?

To show their gratitude the airline bosses could at least invite the Fifa chiefs to a nice dinner in some posh Rio establishment after the final.

Meanwhile the fans are back home, trying to justify their enormous credit card bills.