Stadium
Estádio do Morumbi
Fan-funded football arena whose permanent seats were once sold door to door to pay for its concrete.
0:00≈ 2 min
Location
0:00≈ 2 min
About this audio guide
This guide to Estádio do Morumbi in São Paulo follows goalkeeper Jose Poy, who spent the 1950s saving penalties on Sundays and knocking on doors on weekdays, selling his own club's supporters a cadeira cativa, a permanent seat in a stadium still being dug out of a muddy hillside. It traces how the club sold twelve thousand chairs to fund the concrete, sold its old ground to keep buying cement, and still watched construction stall for seven years between 1961 and 1968. Fans who bought a chair in 1952 waited until 1970 to finally sit in it.
This audio guide was created using AI.