Wasting our time since 1870

In Fortaleza the other night a crowd of protesters yelled: "Brazil, wake up! A teacher is worth more than Neymar!" It's a fairly naff slogan that won't ignite any revolutions but it does carry a little back-heel of truth.

Because, no matter how artfully Neymar writes the future of a football by wrapping his instep around it, he cannot write the future of ordinary Brazilian children. Not with his instep, at any rate. He could help with a cheque or two.

Football matters deeply to billions but it really shouldn't. Let's be honest: it's a brainless pastime and it has functioned as an opiate of the downtrodden since it was legitimised by the Victorian authorities as an outlet for the aggression of English and Scottish industrial workers. The apartheid regime also used football as a drug in the 1980s by allowing the non-racial National Soccer League to thrive as a tame substitute for freedom.

Nowadays, the middle classes make up a large chunk of the world's footie-loving population. But the game still takes its toll on working people by imposing an opportunity cost: it's a monumental waste of time. If we weren't thinking about football, we could be having sex, or plotting revolutions, or becoming tycoons.

And the opportunity cost of football goes way beyond any given geezer's free time. Because, in order to win Fifa's rotten affections, Brazil and South Africa have frittered away billions on building World Cup stadiums - money that was desperately needed to train teachers, doctors, nurses and policemen.

Before 2010, many of us (this writer included) pooh-poohed South Africa's anti-World Cup campaigners as joyless naysayers. We reasoned that the state's delivery crisis was not about a shortage of money but about a shortage of skills. If the World Cup proved South Africa's ability to succeed, we said, it would serve as an inspirational and practical model for broader progress and equity.

So much for that theory. It turns out that 2010's major beneficiaries are a couple of million swanky urbanites who can now savour the first-world glamour of the Gautrain, the ease of world-class airport malls and the mental stimulation of Justin Bieber concerts held in incredible stadiums.

Not that the bourgeoisie don't matter to the future of this country: their happiness and sense of progress are essential to South Africa's success. And it's significant that most of the Brazilian demonstrators this week are not broke outsiders with bleak futures. As in Turkey, they are students and young professionals in a rising economy; they're on course for comfortable lives. They see a state infected with corruption and complacency, and it enrages their wired, globalised minds.

You won't find a country more in love with football than Brazil and thousands of the demonstrators have proudly worn club and national team shirts. But they know that Neymar isn't going to change the world.

So who will? They will.