Making Holidays of Games

To work or not to work? Regardless of where anyone here stands on the logic of Brazil's spending billions of dollars in preparation for hosting this year's World Cup, the question as opening day approaches is hugely pertinent.

The answer is, well, probably not.

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In this country, where soccer is both creed and compulsion, the government weighed whether to declare national holidays on Brazil game days, a decision that is as much about productivity as it is about common sense. Can you expect anyone to focus when the national team is on the field?

Such holidays, or at least other kinds of soccer-induced paralysis, are not entirely uncommon. In Italy in 1990, it was hard to get a meal while the host team was playing, because all waiters had their eyes glued to the television screens. But Brazil has taken it to another level.

Across the country, schools public and private have scheduled midyear vacations so they could start before the tournament's inaugural game, on Thursday. Banks are set to close early, slashing their hours almost in half. Hospitals must stay open, but doctors have been routinely rescheduling nonemergency appointments so they have no commitments when Brazil is playing.

"There's before the Cup, and there's after the Cup, and nothing much beyond soccer is going to happen in between," said Antenor de Paula, 53, a clerk at a federal revenue bureau here, as he carried a box of beer cans out of a local supermarket on Friday, when Brazil had a friendly match against Serbia. (The beer, he said, is for "a big party my neighbor is hosting for the game.")

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While there will be no national holidays for the Cup, there will be plenty of gainfully employed individuals legitimately watching the games wherever they choose. The broad federal statute that governs the legal dos and don'ts during the tournament gave cities the authority to decide if game days ought to be work days - and there are enough holidays, half-days and another arrangement that loosely translates as "optional shift" to give a break to pretty much everyone but emergency workers and bartenders.

It is more than most Brazilians were afforded in previous World Cups, when it was generally up to employers to decide if anyone got to leave work early. This time, federal employees, like de Paula, are going to be dismissed at 12:30 p.m. on days Brazil takes the field so they can get home in time for kickoff.

In Campinas, on the outskirts of Sao Paulo, City Hall workers are to leave at the same time, the unworked hours to be made up in 30- to 60-minute increments during the year. Fortaleza, a host city on the northeastern coast, declared a municipal holiday on June 17, when Brazil plays Mexico there, and a half-day on June 24, when the local game is between Greece and Ivory Coast.

"Most of the tickets for this game were sold to people from our state," Lucirene Maciel, a spokeswoman for Fortaleza's mayor, Roberto Claudio, said in a telephone interview. "It's a matter of easing mobility, but people also want to have fun."

© 2014 New York Times News Service