World Cup 2010

World Cup 2010: Will £800m buy positive images of South Africa?

Concerns raised over ticket prices and crime – but organisers are confident Africa's first World Cup will be a success
The new stadium in Cape Town
The new stadium in Cape Town, one of 10 World Cup venues finished on time. Photograph: David Rogers/Getty Images

Nations clamour to host the World Cup or Olympic Games principally because such prestige sporting events represent global adverts, broadcasting to the world a country's charms, competence and modernity. The stakes are always enormous, from Pretoria to London, to justify vast amounts of public spending on stadiums, transport and other infrastructure for tournaments that last just weeks.

For the organisers of the first World Cup ever to be held in Africa, the pressure has been much higher than normal, with every aspect of the preparations, and South Africa's fitness to host the tournament, continually under scrutiny. The central question always legitimately asked of a country grappling to forge its post-apartheid future and deal with entrenched poverty, particularly in the black townships, is whether South Africa should really be spending £800m in public money hosting a football tournament.

The government's response has been that the investment, and the money to be spent by the arriving army of fans, will boost the economy by five times that figure, and a successful World Cup will also beam to the world an optimistic, can-do attitude too seldom associated with Africa.


Given the exacting scale of the task set by Fifa to host its landmark tournament, huge progress has been made to produce 10 venues of the required capacity finished on time, a massive road expansion programme, and rail links including new terminals built next to each of the five stadiums specifically built for the tournament. Practically, the competition can definitely go ahead, a prospect that has not always been certain as construction was punctuated by workers striking over pay. Security in a country sporting ugly crime statistics has been a persistent concern which, together with the fears that the infrastructure would not be ready, led to Fifa reportedly preparing contingency plans to move the event.

South Africa has responded with the promise of a blanket deployment of police and security officers – with 41,000 policing the World Cup alone – and the army and Interpol closely involved. Fans will be given precise instructions about which well-trodden paths not to stray from.

These arrangements prompted Danny Jordaan, South Africa 2010's organising committee's chief executive, to say last November that his remaining concerns were about tickets and accommodation. The chief criticism of the ticketing policy is that prices, starting at £11, are too expensive for most football-supporting black South Africans, and the requirement to book ahead excludes them too.

Jordaan told a South African parliamentary committee last week that 311,000 tickets remain unsold of 3 million in total, but there are reports that large further numbers of tickets, and corporate packages, have not yet been taken up.

Yet Jordaan and Butana Komphela, chair of the parliament's sports and recreation committee, have both angrily rejected criticism of the country's preparations, arguing that they betray a latent anti-African prejudice about the country's ability to pull it off.

It seems, however, that the organisers do still have some way to go if football fans from the wealthier countries are to be accommodated in the style to which they are accustomed in Europe.

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