RIO DE JANEIRO: With a record five World Cup titles and a reputation for fostering The Beautiful Game, Brazil should have little difficulty attracting fans to next year's tournament.
Yet nine months before the big kick off the Latin American powerhouse is already considering the social legacy of the event.
And in so doing, the Brazilians are giving a new meaning to the phrase 'captive audience'.
It's a concept they're taking quite literally up in the northern Amazonas state, where Tuesday plans emerged to transform the brand new stadium in the regional capital Manaus into a prisoner processing centre.
"It is one of the options on the table being proposed to the regional authorities," a spokesman for the Amazonas state courts system told AFP.
Seeking to find solutions to overcrowding in state penitentiaries, the scheme is the brainchild of Sabino Marques, a judge who chairs a regional prison monitoring group.
"I can't see a better site, albeit it on a temporary basis, for housing the detainees in Manaus," the Folha de Sao Paulo daily quoted Marques as saying Tuesday.
A local sambadrome is another candidate to house the new centre but Marques is proposing the 44,000-seat capacity, $280 million (207 million euros) football stadium as a viable alternative once it has first staged four World Cup matches.
What happens to the swanky stadium after the tournament is not clear as Manaus, a sweltering city of some 2.5 million people, does not have a major football team.
There are widespread fears the venue could become a 'white elephant' after next year's June 12-July 13 tournament, hence the need to find alternative uses for the ground.
Similar fears surround the construction of three other arenas -- in Brasilia, Cuiaba in the centre-west, and in Natal in the northeast, although first division matches held in Brasilia featuring top teams from elsewhere have drawn large crowds.
The Amazonas state court system has therefore put forward the novel prisoner transit suggestion to a state government currently pondering how to deal with an overcrowded processing system.
"Until the state resolves the problem (of overcrowding by) constructing new prisons, then it should use these two idle venues," Marques insists clearly considering the stadium as having served its current purpose once the World Cup caravan has moved on.
The courts spokesman would not elaborate on other potential post-World Cup uses for the stadium.
Although Brazilians overwhelmingly support the World Cup returning to the country for the first time since 1950, as well as the Rio Olympic Games in 2016, they are less happy about the soaring costs of hosting the world's biggest sporting extravaganza.
The World Cup alone is set to produce a bill of $16 billion. Brazilian Football Confederation President Jose Maria Marin said in May that Brazil had to get "creative" in order to avoid finding itself saddled with white elephant stadiums.
That fate has befallen assorted World Cup and Olympic host cities in the past.
Taxpayers in 1976 Olympic hosts Montreal were still picking up the tab for their "Big Owe" stadium three decades later while several sites from the 2004 Athens Games now lie unused.
Marin urged that "those administering these stadiums must use their creativity" while sports minister Aldo Rebelo stressed the stadiums were built "to host not just football matches but also events and act as commercial spaces" in general.
Rebelo added he was "very confident in the future of these stadiums." The Folha de Sao Paulo meanwhile took a sardonic view of the Manaus proposal, publishing a cartoon depicting three brutish-looking jailbirds stood in a stadium playing keepy uppy with a black ball on a chain attached to their legs.
Brazil is not the first country to think of herding prisoners through a sports stadium though the original incarnation of the idea involved something far more gruesome.
Following Chile's military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet 40 years ago, the regime herded thousands of political opponents into the national stadium in Santiago, where many were tortured.
In happier times, the venue saw action during Chile's 1962 World Cup.
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