Why Your World Cup Stadium Sucks: Estádio Beira-Rio, Porto Alegre

The Estádio Beira-Rio is a beautiful, if not slightly underwhelming, piece of architecture that gives Porto Alegre two modern multi-use pitches in the course of two years. There's a good chance they didn't need both.

Capacity: 50,000

Date Completed: 1969; Renovated in 2013

Number of Workplace Deaths: None

Most Closely Resembles: One of those awful chocolate orange things just, you know, really big.

I was going to start this article off by talking about how Estádio Beira-Rio's $150m price tag didn't seem exorbitant considering the significant facelift hype studio architecture put on the original arena. The old Beira-Rio was a product of its era: concrete benches and flat, open sight lines and a noticeable lack of shade that would instantly incinerate any English person. (See also: the original Estádio Fonte Nova in Salvador.) The stadiums built back then were pragmatic single-use spaces. You played a match, you left disappointed or satisfied, you repeated the next Saturday. The improvements made to Estádio Beira-Rio shoved the arena into the 21st century aesthetically and spiritually: there's now an entire deck of corporate suites, a few retail operations, VIP areas, restaurants, and a museum detailing the exploits of Internacional, the Porto Alegre side that calls the stadium home. The old and new Beira-Rio are really two sides of the same coin minted fifty years apart.

So I was going to start off talking about that until I was told that Porto Alegre built another stadium, Arena do Grêmio, in 2012 for $280m. It's the rough equivalent of New York City building a stadium for the Mets and the Yankees in the same year.

You could easily make the argument that erecting and renovating a dozen stadiums in a country that has no shortage of excellent soccer pitches is a colossal waste of resources. International tournaments—and the twin Olympics and World Cup are really the only events in the same strata as far as financial investment is concerns—are pageants first, a chance for a city or country to flex its soft power even if they've been working those muscles for the better part of a century. Brazil's position as World Cup host shouldn't be thought of any differently. Even though the message was inconveniently obfuscated by a glut of protests, accidents, corruption, and, unfairly, cultural criticism, it's clear that the mandarins behind Brazil's World Cup bid were there to say, " Twelve billion dollars? Big fuckin' deal."

Corruption Score: 3 out of 5 Blatters

Originally Estádio Beira-Rio's renovations were going to be paid for by Internaciona. But after FIFA's draconian standards were applied to the original plan, the refurbishment costs rose by nearly $70m. This shifted the onus onto Porto Alegre and the state of Rio Grande do Sul.

Internacional is a hell of a club with one of the best nicknames in soccer: Celeiro de Ases, the "Factory of Aces."Superstars like Oscar, Diego Forlán, and Alexadre Pato have called the Beira-Rio home at some point in their career, as well as lesser luminaries like Leandro Damião and Lúcio. Even though they had a rough campaign in 2013—they finished 15th—they occupy the tier right below Serie A titans São Paulo and Santos which means the 50,000 seats in Rio-Beria shouldn't be cold once the World Cup leaves town.

Porto Alegre seems cool, I would go if I was in the area.

Beira-Rio's renovation is not a great piece of architecture, but it's not meant to be anything more than an aesthetic update of an arena that didn't have room for all-inclusive suites and VIP lounges. It's unimaginative but visually effective. It's Gehry by Target.

Previously: Arena Pernambuco, Recife | Arena Fonte Nova, Salvador | Arena Baixada, Curitiba | Arena Pantanal, Cuiabá | Arena Das Dunas, Natal | Arena Amazonia, Manaus

TM Brown is a city planner living in New York. If you want him to bore you to death talking about infrastructure and urban planning, follow him on Twitter, @RadialsBlog.

Screamer is Deadspin's soccer site. We're @ScreamerDS on Twitter. We'll be partnering with our friends at Howler Magazine throughout the World Cup. Follow them on Twitter, @whatahowler.

Photo credit: Getty