time (a two-week event), space (one host city only, or even specific areas within the city) and investment (the operating and infrastructure costs of the Games are in billions) seems to conflict with the concept of sustainable development, that calls for the distribution and sharing of environmental, social and economic impacts across time and space for spreading benefits and minimising negative effects on the whole society.
There was much anticipation both within and beyond South Africa over the legacies of the 2010 FIFA World Cup and what South Africa’s hosting of the event could mean for a country in which levels of social inequality, violence and deprivation are high. While the event might leave an important political legacy, it was less clear what its long-term economic effects would be.
Further, in a gloomy current international economic environment, and given the fact that national growth prospects have been adversely affected by the country’s energy supply deficit, it is reasonable to expect that by the time the final totting-up has been done it will be found that the South African government ended up spending much more on the 2010 World Cup than it had initially anticipated, even though some might regard that as already exorbitant. On the other hand, some economists argued that the World Cup did have positive stimulatory effects which could help offset the deflationary path which the economy is expected to undergo over the next few years.
In the lead-up to the World Cup, the government of President Jacob Zuma had had to contend with growing social unrest, municipal strikes and demands for improved service delivery. Social protest had progressively grown in scale and violence during the course of 2009. While it was not directly related to the World Cup, it is noteworthy that there was an increasing spontaneous tide of civic action that questioned what the real benefits of the event would be. An illustrative case is a violent demonstration in late October 2009 in the township bordering the Soccer City stadium, during which residents vowed that ‘there will be no 2010’ because they had no houses and no jobs. The government is ‘pouring money into 2010... why are they not pouring money into housing?’ (The Times, 22 October 2009).
To a significant extent the World Cup and its legacy threatens to become part of South Africa’s broader politics of class contestation, as there is an increasing demand that the event should have benefited not only major businesses and the affluent, but also the country’s poor. A hidden aspect of South Africa’s obvious construction boom, for example, is the extent to which the commercial opportunities linked to this expansion was absorbed by only a few dominant construction firms (for reviews of the politics of stadium construction, see for instance Alegi 2007).
These aspects present a number of challenges to the national government, which not only had to deliver a well prepared and safe tournament that satisfies international scrutiny, but also had to respond to an increasingly restive domestic constituency. Given the experience of previous sports events hosted by South Africa, the 2010 World Cup had the potential to foster racial reconciliation and nation building, even if that was short-lived. This was to depend, however, on how successful the event was judged to have been by the international community, and on whether people in South Africa believe that the tournament brought them real material benefits. Ultimately, it may well turn out that the World Cup created economic benefit for only a handful.
NOTES
1 In reality, the expansion of the Summer Games programme has been more extensive since each sport has a number of different disciplines and involves competitions for men and women.
2 Cited in ‘Sorge um Unterkünft in Südafrika,’ www.sportal.de/sportal/generated/.../14293300000.html
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