A Worrisome Photo Of Sao Paulo's World Cup Stadium Looking Half-Built 9 Days Before The Opening Game

The Itaquerão stadium in São Paulo will host the opening game of the World Cup in nine days.

It's not ready yet.

One end of the stadium - a section of temporary seats that has yet to be approved for use by the fire department - looks half-built. Sky Sports reporter Geraint Hughes says that the stadium looks totally incomplete in person:

"Then I looked properly and a large chunk of it looked, well, missing.

"One end of the £300million stadium is very much unfinished. It has no roof and it just looked like scaffolding with no attempt yet to hide a pretty ugly facade."

Journalist Davidde Corran posted a photo of that end of the stadium today.

There's scaffolding all over the place:

The entrance ramp to the stadium is makeshift:

A final test match was held at the Itaquerão on Sunday, but only 40,000 of the 65,000 seats were sold because that temporary stand with all the scaffolding isn't ready to use yet.

The stadium will go into the World Cup without hosting a single full-capacity event. It was supposed to be finished by December 2013.