Brazilians anxiously await for World Cup

Bola Pantai Timur felt unusually sad when Marcos Alexandre de Souza Soares had to cut short his stint with Terengganu in 2005. A cool and difficult to beat central defender, he spent 12 years as a professional player before turning to coaching since 2011. Our friendship continues and Marcos has duly agreed to share his knowledge and insights as well as football news from Brazil in this blog.  He really misses the time he was playing for Terengganu, saying”It  was a great time and a pleasure to have lived and played there.” Please put your hands together to warmly welcome Marcos in his first contribution...

Brasilia: There is a small Brazilian club in Kuala Terengganu, Malaysia, centring around Terengganu and T-Team import players and coaches – Marcio de Souza, Fabio Flor de Azevedo, Evaldo Rodrigues Goncalves, Stefano Impagliazzo – and their families.  

Back home, it has been said that Brazil is a football-crazy nation. Do you know what kind of numbers we are talking about here? Now, Brazil has around 202 million  citizens.

Former Terengganu central defender and current Brasilia FC coach, Marcos Alexandre de Souza Soares shares with Bola Pantai Timur, “We have almost 700 professional clubs, and around 12000 professionals players.” He says that last year they were around 1500 international transfers from Brazil, adding ,“We probably have around 2000 players overseas.”

Marcos sees a great World Cup in June

Last season in the country’s regional championship Brasilia FC was in the second position and played in the 4th division of its national championship.  This season Brasilia aspires to win the regional and to go far in the national champioship and Brazil Cup (knock-out).

Understandably at present everybody in Brazil is anxiously waiting for the beginning of Brazil World Cup 2014, due to start in mid-June.

Marcos is optimistic it will be a great World Cup.

He says, “ The infrastructure development for the World Cup is going well even though with some natural delays. Notwithstanding small infrastructure problems, we will have a great World Cup.” Marcos adds, “The stadiums will be nice and ready on time. Maybe there will be problems at the airports and transport, but it is now much better that before.”

As the host and football factory for the world, is Brazil going to be the champion this time?

“I think it will be a very tough fight for the title, but I’m sure that Brazil has a good chance of winning World Cup 2014,” opines Marcos. Something which the Kuala Terengganu Brazilian club members most likely agree to, the recent Larkin stadium controversy notwithstanding.  

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