Fifa gambled on the host nation for the World Cup, and it's already
a tense race against time
Scene One: Pretoria, a mild summer evening, a meeting of
the congregation of the local Dutch Reformed Church. The talk is in Afrikaans,
the speakers are white, approaching retirement, the subject is an unusual
one for this crowd: football. 'What can we do to help in 2010?' they are
asking. They are among the first volunteers of the thousands that South
Africa needs to find over the next 1,200 days.
Scene Two: an open-air market in Bushbuckridge, an hour or so from the
border with Mozambique. A women's co- operative, Swazi speakers with baskets
of beads and fabrics, discuss an idea for an event that is still 3? years
away: flag-bags, they will call them, less than ?5 for woven bags in the
national colours of Italy or France - even the St George's Cross, if England
should make it.
Various parts of the planet get diagnosed with World Cup fever for a month
every four years. In South Africa it is already an epidemic. June 2010
can hardly come quickly enough for the next organisers of sport's most
watched event. They are eagerly awaiting its festival - and its tourist
dollars, euros and pounds, its business opportunities.
As for Fifa, the owner of the World Cup, the tournament will arrive quite
soon enough: lately, its president, Sepp Blatter, has looked at his watch
and given it a tap as he surveys the preparations. Of the 10 stadiums
earmarked for the tournament across South Africa, four are not much further
than site-clearing, and one is not there yet. The 2006 World Cup had barely
wound down in Berlin when a few of the game's chancers thought they glimpsed
an opening. John O'Neill, the then chief executive of Football Federation
Australia, seemed to be offering an alternative when he spoke of 'all
sorts of question marks' over South Africa's readiness.
Question marks go with the territory. No Olympic Games or World Cup takes
place without an alarm being raised over building schedules. Assigning
Fifa's modern, 32-team, multi- billion-dollar World Cup to the developing
world for the first time seems to provoke the big question more often:
can South Africa deliver? Yes, insists Fifa. The stadium work, as the
country's president, Thabo Mbeki, pointed out last week, is actually several
months ahead of where Germany's was in December 2002.
The finance is in place, Mbeki's treasury having committed ?840m to stadium
construction and ?670m to infrastructure improvement. Soon they will start
to be judged by their own deadlines: work must have begun by February
on all the new stadiums. In the country's most attractive city, Cape Town,
that may be tight. Greenpoint stadium, with its retractable roof - June
can be squally in the Cape - is planned for a site by the ocean in view
of some handsome properties, but a local civic association is resisting
aspects of the current plan.
Outside Nelspruit, 1,200 miles away in Mpumalanga province, two schools
have to be relocated for the Mbombela stadium to rise on community farmland.
In places such as this, the World Cup will have a transforming effect.
'I hope it will bring some jobs,' says Kaizer, 19, a student at the John
Mdluli school, where classrooms are to make way for centre circles and
penalty areas, 'and I hope my journey to school won't have to be longer
now.'
World Cups are obliged to leave a positive legacy and it is legitimate
to suppose that if one fails to do so in Africa, it would weigh heavier
on the host nation than one that makes no lasting impact in a wealthy
economy of western Europe. The tournament will make a huge profit for
Fifa, whose income from broadcast rights and only a tranche of the big
sponsorship deals has already reached $3.1 billion, exceeding its previous
tournament income , with more rights still to sell.
The benefits to a nation are harder to specify but South Africa would
expect a significant boost to its thriving tourist industry. If tens of
thousands of jobs are created - one of the more modest forecasts - it
will also put a dent in the unemployment figures that show a quarter of
the population to be jobless.
'If it doesn't leave a legacy, you question the wisdom of the whole thing,'
says Trevor Phillips, the chief executive of South Africa's Premier Soccer
League (PSL). 'There are huge challenges but I've no doubt it will be
a great success.'
Phillips was the commercial director of the Football Association when
England hosted Euro 96, so he knows a little of what a successful tournament
can do to the landscape. He feels that South Africa, while on the right
track, may be left with one or two expensive white elephants. His PSL,
for instance, has no club in Mpumalanga to inherit the new stadium there
and bring in regular sizeable crowds. 'I can understand why politically
you need to spread the venues out, but commercially not all of them make
sense,' he said.
Commercially, Phillips adds, the local organisers have to find a sensitive
middle ground that ensures World Cup events do not exclude ordinary South
Africans come June and July 2010. The price of a soft drink at one of
the successful Fanfest sites - big screens and Fifa- endorsed fast food
- in Germany last summer would be half a day's pay for a Johannesburg
shelf-stacker. A formula for match ticketing that will not price out the
vast majority of South Africans is among the organising committee's priorities;
and keeping those cheaper tickets off the black market is as tough a riddle.
Then there is the South African story that never goes away: crime. The
US ambassador in Pretoria made public this month the experience of a group
of German tour operators on a World Cup fact-finding mission to South
Africa. They were robbed. Crime figures are falling but are still horribly
high. For all that, the country's security record at previous events such
as the rugby union and cricket World Cups of 1995 and 2003 was close to
impeccable.
The football equivalent is of a different scale, and the infrastructure
may creak. The trains that carry supporters between venues in 2010 will
not be as slick as those that shifted fans in Germany last summer or in
Japan in 2002. There will also be fewer of them: rail is the one area
in which South Africa's infrastructure conspicuously falls short. Most
fans will move around by air or road.
Most teams, meanwhile, will travel less than they are used to, the first-round
groups being based around specific areas of the largest country to host
a World Cup since the USA in 1994. Where they base themselves may be open
to tender throughout not just the country but the region. The local organisers,
keen to stress that this is a continent's tournament, not simply South
Africa's, are encouraging neighbouring states to offer training sites
to qualifying nations ahead of the event (and, if Fifa sanctions it, perhaps
during the competition too). Portuguese-speaking Mozambique is lobbying
the Brazilian FA. And here's a prospect to raise eyebrows at the FA and
10 Downing Street: Zimbabwe might invite England to spend time there.
There are plans to set up World Cup fan sites in every African capital.
'You have to bring in the local culture,' says Phillips, 'and I'm sure
they will. I can't help but feel that fans who come here will experience
the diversity, the noise, the colour and be overwhelmed.'
, December 31, 2006.
Russian ladies dream about happy marriage.
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