Once, there was something mysterious about World Cups. In a world without satellite television or the internet, we lived on meagre rations of foreign football. Every four years, players, styles and moves appeared, enchantingly, out of nowhere. Now, we have access to almost the entirety of global football, and many of those players are in Britain. Before cheap air travel, attending a football match in a foreign country was a complex adventure which few fans could afford. It wasn’t much easier for the teams—it took the Yugoslavs three weeks to sail to Uruguay in 1930. In 1954, the South Koreans’ flight schedule was so complicated that they arrived in Switzerland with just ten hours before their first game. The Hungarians thrashed them 9-0. And how the show was put on was a mystery too—with press coverage left to football correspondents, the political and economic preparations that all World Cups entail went unnoticed. The build-up to the first World Cup, in Uruguay in 1930, was barely remarked upon outside the country, and the tournament itself attracted little coverage. In 1934, in Italy, the press arrived in great numbers for the event, but the agenda was controlled by Il Duce. By 1978, however, international scrutiny had risen sufficiently for the Argentinian junta to employ the services of US public relations company Burson-Marsteller. Émigré and human rights groups had attempted to organise a boycott of the tournament but were brushed aside and the junta was able to prosecute its “dirty war” against its own people while spending a quarter of the state budget on preparing for the finals.
1954: a win for West Germany made it “someone again” The creator and ultimate custodian of the World Cup is of course Fifa (Fédération Internationale de Football Association), the sport’s global governing body. Traditionally, once Fifa has chosen a country, it leaves the host to get on with the tournament. The 1986 finals were the exception, after even Fifa realised it would be impossible to hide a narco-fuelled civil war in Colombia, its first choice, and turned to Mexico. An earthquake killed 12,000 Mexicans in 1985, but Fifa didn’t flinch and neither did Mexico. Mexico had kept up appearances before—it staged the 1968 Olympics a few weeks after political rioting in its capital—and the World Cup duly went ahead. South Africa has not yet had to deal with an earthquake but it has been the most closely scrutinised World Cup to date. The country has endured a public firestorm of criticism and debate since Fifa announced its decision in 2004. The Beijing Olympics attracted as much attention, but South Africa is both much more open to the rest of the world’s press and much more self-critical than China. The revelation in 2008 that Fifa had a plan B for the tournament in the event of disaster provided further leverage for the noisy “it should never have gone to South Africa” brigade. They have been predicting that the stadiums would not be built on time, that there would be a shortage of accommodation and even that grass on the pitches would not grow. Plan B will not be needed. Admittedly, this will not be like the 2006 World Cup in Germany, the first mega sporting event to be ready ahead of schedule and one of the few to make a profit. But this is surely part of the point of the exercise: we are going to the southern hemisphere, where most of the world lives and things work differently. Naturally there have been real problems. The corruption, and subsequent violence, surrounding the construction of the stadium in Nelspruit in the north east of the country points to a worrying growth of kickbacks in South Africa. And the legacy the World Cup will leave to grassroots football is piffling—two township soccer centres from Fifa and 50-odd artificial pitches funded by the South African national lottery. The most common concern in the international press has, of course, been the issue of personal security. South Africa has among the highest rates of violent and sexual crimes in the world. The possibility of violence is a legitimate concern, but the coverage has lacked any sense of empathy with South Africans, who spend an enormous amount of time and energy worrying about crime and adapting their circumstances and behaviour accordingly. A certain amount of judiciousness among visitors, combined with the government’s plan to swamp city centres with police should defuse this problem. Anxiety deepened in January this year, when the Togolese national football team was attacked by Angolan rebels on its way to the African Cup of Nations. Three members of the squad were killed and the team returned home. There followed hysterical calls from some (most notably the then manager of Hull City, Phil Brown) for the World Cup to be moved or abandoned. Danny Jordaan, chief executive of the 2010 World Cup organising committee, wearily but firmly told the press: “If there is a war in Kosovo and a World Cup in Germany, no one asks if the World Cup can go on in Germany.” Why, one wonders, are countries prepared to put up with this kind of thing for the sake of the tournament? It certainly isn’t for economic reasons. Since winning the bid with some optimistic projections, the South African government has found the cost of the tournament has risen tenfold to over 30bn rand (£2.7bn). In May, Fifa gave South Africa £67m to upgrade training facilities for the teams. The money that has been spent has primarily benefited large companies and skilled workers. At the same time, estimates of income and visitor numbers have fallen. The evidence from previous World Cups, including Germany’s, suggests that there is almost no long-term benefit in the form of increased output or higher employment for a host nation. The politicians know this. They know that the money spent on staging the tournament could go instead on sewers and low-cost housing to benefit the poor, but they can’t resist. Politicians and nations have their stories to tell. And alongside the scrutiny comes the chance to engage the whole of humanity. Look at England. Not put off by the spiralling cost of the London Olympics, it is bidding for the 2018 World Cup—although the resignation of the bid’s chairman, Lord Triesman, in May, after he accused Russia and Spain of plotting to bribe refs at this year’s competition (he said his comments “were never meant to be taken seriously”) can’t have helped its chances.
1962: the dazzling Garrincha gave the Brazilians victory South Africa, then, is not the first nation with a story to tell the world. How does it compare to previous efforts? The political narratives of past World Cups fall into several categories. First, there are the coming-out parties; exercises in soft power that are announcements of arrival or gains in status, though these are rarer than one might imagine. For many nations, it is the Olympics rather than the World Cup that has served as the primary global acknowledgement of either their successful industrialisation and modernisation (Mexico City 1968, Seoul 1988, Beijing 2008) or their reintegration into the international community after a period of exile (Rome 1960 and Tokyo 1964). But the 1974 West German World Cup, following hard on the heels of the 1972 Munich Olympics, carried a message of both reintegration and normalisation; that there had been a stable resolution to the German question. It was a message underscored by the luck of a draw that pitted the two Germanys against each other for the first time in international sports. England 1966 had elements of this, for it marked an end to the country’s semi-detached status from the footballing world. Initially dismissive of both Fifa and its World Cup, the home nations had joined the world body late, left the organisation twice in the 1920s and refused to play at the first three tournaments. Even in 1955, Chelsea were offered the chance to take part in the first European Cup and declined. But by the mid-1960s England was emerging from its post-imperial shell; it had played at the previous four World Cups, its clubs coveted European glory and Fifa was run by an Englishman, Stanley Rous. Finally, the inventors of the game would host its greatest competitive expression. Celebrations of social transformation are thinner on the ground. Uruguay fell into this category in 1930, the tournament coinciding with the 100th anniversary of the nation’s constitution. Victory for the host country not only confirmed the success of its booming economy, functioning democracy and nascent welfare state, but provided the most tangible expression of the imagined community of the nation in its short history. Similarly, the successful Spanish transition to democracy was crowned by hosting the 1982 World Cup. Brazil 1950 was in the same mould, a sporting celebration of the wave of urbanisation and economic development which began under the authoritarian populist Getúlio Vargas. The Brazilian team set out on what appeared to be an unstoppable, triumphal march to the title. However, when they were beaten by Uruguay in the final 2-1, in front of the biggest crowd ever for a game of football, the country descended into an acid bath of self-loathing and recrimination. Over the past 20 years three European countries have hosted the World Cup for a second time and all have used it as an opportunity for global rebranding. Italia 90 showcased the emergent post-industrial nation of high fashion, high tech and high-concept architecture and for those who chose to look, its hidden circuits of corruption, political cliques and organised crime. France 1998 looked at first to be a confirmation of its étatisme, the sporting expression of François Mitterrand’s grands projets, but was soon taken over by the dynamic of its unprecedentedly multicultural team. Germany 2006 told us that, a decade and half after unification, it was time to loosen up—and thanks to the brio and verve of its young team, the nation duly responded. Public space in Germany was carnivalesque and uncharacteristically open. At the opposite end of the spectrum there have been World Cups hosted by highly authoritarian societies, which have used the tournament as a way of buttressing domestic and international legitimacy: Mussolini’s Italy in 1934, the Argentina’s military junta in 1978 and the Mexican World Cups of 1970 and 1986. If these tournaments were most squarely aligned to state power, others have been most closely shaped by Fifa’s political and commercial agendas. Both USA 1994 and Korea/Japan 2002 were about showcasing football in regions of the world where the game had previously been either a minority sport or a semi-professional backwater. Finally, there have been the “small” World Cups of the postwar era. The second world war had left Europe’s leading economic and football powers in ruins, but it provided an opportunity for neutral Switzerland (1954) and Sweden (1958) to host the Cup. In 1962, Chile got the sympathy vote after its football federation president Carlos Dittborn pleaded “You must give us the World Cup, for we have nothing else.” The ramshackle quaintness of those World Cups ensured we will never see their like again. No future tournament could feature a game like the one in the Swedish city of Norrköping, in which the crowd was held back from the touchline by a rope hung on wooden posts, nor a final like Santiago in 1962, in which the crowd invaded the pitch to celebrate the champions. What endures of these World Cups is not the host’s experience, but the stage they provided for the narrative and sporting triumphs of others. West Germany’s victory in 1954 served as the founding cultural moment of a democratic federal republic—captured in the phrase Wir sind wieder wer (We’re someone again). Sweden 1958 belonged to Brazil and the teenage Pele; 1962 to the dazzling Garrincha.
1966: England’s win brings football home So what kind of World Cup is 2010 shaping up to be? It isn’t a coming out party or an exercise in rebranding. Nelson Mandela’s walk from jail and his inauguration as president are difficult to top, even for the World Cup. South Africa’s global image of a rainbow nation, democratic miracle, multicultural experiment, regional power house and keystone of the African renaissance has been honed since the nation hosted and won the 1995 Rugby World Cup and 1996 African Cup of Nations. Expect more of the same messages rather than a rewrite. Indeed, given the tensions and disappointments of South African politics, the failure to close the huge income divide and the fraying transparency and probity of public life, expect the message in spades. Africa adopted football as its sporting obsession long ago, so comparisons with the 1994 (USA) or 2002 (Korea/Japan) World Cups, which were largely driven by Fifa’s imperial ambitions for the game, are misplaced. Fifa’s goal this time is not to take football to Africa but to bring the market, in the shape of its global multinational sponsors, to African football. Nearly all of Fifa’s income derives from the World Cup. Global television rights bring in around $2bn and another $1.2bn comes from tiers of corporate sponsorship whose cost ranges from around $200m (to be one of six Fifa partners) down to $50m for local sponsors. Around $1bn of that goes on Fifa’s expenses, television production costs and prize money, the other $2.2bn it keeps. Half of that sum is spent on running Fifa’s lesser tournaments and programmes, which leaves about $1bn left to play with. South Africa, by contrast, will be stuck with a multibillion-pound bill for stadiums and infrastructure, much of which will fall on municipalities and provinces whose finances are already shaky. They will have acquired some splendid sporting arenas but these come with huge running costs and in many cases no regular tenant. Fifa can’t defray this kind of spending, but it could surely have managed something better than the trickle of a few tiny legacy projects and a last-minute cash injection to bring training grounds up to scratch. But Fifa will feel it has earned its money. Unlike the last World Cup, where it only had to show up, pick up its tickets and bank the cheque, South Africa has made Fifa work. In addition to media firefighting and chivvying its hosts along, the organisation has had to protect its brand and the value of its sponsorship. Fifa has harried ambush marketers and insisted on advertising-free zones to give its sponsors uninterrupted visibility. It has been made to look ridiculous in one long-running battle, when the slogan of the South African low-cost airline Kulula, “Unofficial National Carrier of the You-Know-What,” was deemed a trademark infringement. While the tournament is assured big television viewing figures—a total cumulative audience of 26bn in 214 countries watched the 2006 competition—Fifa will, I suspect, be disappointed at the make-up of the 32 qualifiers. Only five of the world’s most populous countries are in the finals. South Asia is lost to cricket; the endemic corruption in Chinese football has left the standing of the game in tatters with performances from the national team to match. Russia, Indonesia and the whole of west Asia and the middle east are absent too. On the other hand, east Asia (both Koreas and Japan) and the previously football-averse Anglo-Saxon dominions (the US, Australia and New Zealand) are present and the main European and South American powers have all made it through. My guess is that both Fifa and South Africa’s goals will be broadly fulfilled, but there has been a third element to this World Cup—the idea that the tournament does not only belong to South Africa but to the whole continent. Thabo Mbeki gave this idea approval during his tenure as South Africa’s president in 2004, saying: “We want to ensure that one day, historians will reflect upon the 2010 World Cup as a moment when Africa stood tall and… turned the tide on centuries of poverty and conflict. We want to show that Africa’s time has come.” Africa’s time has come, but the promised pan-African dimension to the tournament is almost entirely rhetorical. In the real world, South African townships have been rent by violence against immigrants from other African countries. The numbers of visitors from the rest of the continent is predictably minuscule. The clichéd video that celebrated Africa at the World Cup draw held in Cape Town last December merely reinforced the tourist industry agenda of the global north, featuring pyramids, rural people in traditional dress and large mammals. At no time did it depict urban Africa, where football is loved and played. The concert planned for the day before kick-off was handed over to Control Room, the same American management agency responsible for the Live Earth benefits for climate change—global events in which African artists were peripheral. Not surprisingly, an initial bill was announced that featured few South African stars and only a smattering of artists from the rest of Africa. To its credit, South Africa’s Creative Workers’ Union forced a major change in the concert’s line-up, giving it a much more South African flavour. Worst of all, the long-held promise of an African nation winning the World Cup does not look like being fulfilled. After a brilliant arrival in the early 1990s, the hosts have been caught in a spiral of decline. In the immediate aftermath of the transition to democracy in 1994, the pent-up energies of South African football, excluded from the world game for over three decades, were released. Soweto’s Orlando Pirates stormed the continent and became the club champions of Africa, and the nation hosted and won the 1996 African Cup of Nations. The national team lost the final of the next one to Egypt in 1998, but went to their first World Cup finals in France that same year. Since then it has been a story of relentless decline: no World Cup appearances, and in successive African Cup of Nations tournaments they have come third, made the quarter finals, and been eliminated at the group stage. In 2010, they failed to qualify at all. The decline of the national team has its roots in the problems of the country’s domestic football culture. Football was and remains a black working-class sport and faces tough competition for television money and sponsorship from cricket and its far more affluent white consumers. The governance of football also leaves something to be desired. While post-apartheid governments have expended considerable energy on reforming the white-dominated sports of cricket and rugby, football has been left to its own devices. There have been repeated allegations of match-fixing, bribery, embezzlement and money laundering, followed by police and government investigations and even court cases, but none have seen a satisfactory resolution. The South African Football Association has proved an ineffective watchdog and for much of the past two years, when it should have been preparing for the World Cup, it has been plunged into political infighting. The national squad has been beset by endless changes of management and conflicts between coaches, players based abroad and those playing at home. The best that the optimists can manage is the idea that home advantage will work its magic. However, this will, at best, allow them to make a dignified exit from the first knockout round. Four of the other African sides, Algeria, Côte d’Ivoire, Cameroon and Nigeria, underperformed at the African Cup of Nations. Only Ghana, who made the final without their stars, look as if they might have the spark to do well—and they are in a tough group with Germany, Serbia and Australia. All these teams express the dilemmas of African football. On one hand, an endless conveyor belt of talent has emerged, with the best players heading for the lucrative European leagues. On the other, domestic football is often economically constrained and politically chaotic. Africa’s players could win a World Cup if they had the administrators and institutions to support them. In its own way, South Africa 2010 may be closer to the small World Cups. It won’t be a village fete but it won’t be a sundrenched beered-up tourist paradise or a slick, soulless business convention either. It will be chaotic and occasionally frustrating; it will be a window for the north on the creativity needed to negotiate the constraints of life in the south. Perhaps it will be the stage for someone else’s coming out party, a chance to share a defining moment? In the dying seconds of the 1958 World Cup final, Brazil led hosts Sweden 4-2, having mesmerised the crowd with the invention of their football. When Garrincha danced over the ball without touching it and left two Swedish defenders transfixed, the crowd cheered. When a Brazilian went down injured and the Swedes played on, the crowd hissed. When their own winger slipped as he attempted to cross the ball, the crowd laughed. Minutes later, they were rewarded by Brazil’s fifth and final goal, when Pele’s back-heel and simple arching header evoked rapture. If any team can play football like Brazil in 1958, if the South African crowd, if all of us, can manage the generosity of spirit on display in Stockholm then the accusations and disappointments that have marked this World Cup will, for a moment, be submerged in the mysteries and pleasures of humanity at play.
1998: France’s mould-breakingly multicultural winning team
Counting the cost£2.7bn (R30bn): Estimated total cost to South African government £270m (R3bn): Estimated total cost to South African government when it won the bid in 2004 £192bn (R2.1 trillion): South Africa’s GDP 2009 £246 (R2,700): Estimated average monthly wage £12.78 (R140): Cheapest ticket for group games £96-£574 (R1,050-R6,300): Tickets for final £2.2bn: Total income to Fifa: comprising £1.4bn fortelevision rights and £0.8bn in sponsorship £688m: Cost to Fifa (television production and prize money) £288m: Total prize money, of which the winning team gets £20m
