In the US there is lobbying. In Spain there is soccer. I have seen crazy things done just for soccer. The town I used to live in closed my street for a few weeks during one world cup. I wasn't able to use my garage during all that time.

Also, somehow small towns always find money available for soccer related stuff (like building stadiums, events, etc.) but there is no money for improving healthcare or building parks.

I hated that

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greenavocado an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> Also, somehow small towns always find money available for soccer related stuff (like building stadiums, events, etc.) but there is no money for improving healthcare or building parks.

Bread and circuses. Whatever it takes to suppress the instinctual nationalistic ambitions of the people by redirecting their spirits and energy into /dev/null

	▲	gonzalohm 7 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Those are my thoughts too. I believe there was a world cup or euro cup during the 2008 crisis, which Spain suffered specially badly. All countries were getting out of the "hole" except Spain, but hey we won the euro cup so suddenly our country was the best and everyone forgot about it

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dummydummy1234 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

... Out of curiosity, why did they close the street? Was it to turn it into public walking space? (I'm trying to imagine a reason and coming up short...)

	▲	gonzalohm 10 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It's a wide street and they installed a screen. I guess that's not something that you can set-up for every match so they decided to leave it up the whole time. The problem I have with it is not that my street was closed. It's that soccer always gets all the preferential treatment. Why not set that up for badminton or tennis? We have spectacular players but soccer seems to be the only important sport
	▲	forgotaccount3 42 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Sometimes places close streets for traffic control. The 'main' roads end up getting backed up and then people naturally start drifting over to a bunch of side-roads to get to the destination. This then causes further traffic issues as the locations where side-roads intersect the main roads get backed up as people on the side roads try to merge into the main ones. A solution ends up being closing some side roads to funnel the temporary traffic into the main thoroughfare while still allowing some local traffic through the non-closed side roads at the cost of some side roads being inaccessible.

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FireBeyond an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> Also, somehow small towns always find money available for soccer related stuff (like building stadiums, events, etc.) but there is no money for improving healthcare or building parks.

I mean Texas can hold a candle there. Nearly 30 high school football stadiums with 10,000+ capacity (and 20,000 in a few cases), built for amounts sometimes exceeding $50M each. Some of the stadiums are shared with track and field etc., but others are "exclusively used by the high school football teams".