With the World Cup now gone and the post-tournament depression slowly fading away, I look back on it with mixed emotions. I have been a soccer fan for a couple of decades now and a passionate supporter of my local semi-professional team Tiverton Town from my hometown in the southwest of England but I am also a researcher at the University of Edinburgh looking at soccer supporters in Johannesburg.As a soccer supporter, the World Cup in South Africa was an incredible experience. I went to seven games in total, my highlight being the Uruguay v Ghana quarter-final at Soccer City. The atmosphere in that magnificent stadium was electric! The hospitality shown by many to me will not be forgotten.
I will leave South Africa with many stories but also a sense of satisfaction that South Africa showed the world that it could host an amazing event; European journalists had to eat a large slice of humble pie. Moving back to the UK from Johannesburg last August, I was annoyed to see a large number of newspaper articles stirring up fear in their readers. South Africa was dangerous and crime-ridden. If English tourists going over there weren’t mugged, they would most likely be raped, killed or find themselves in the middle of a race war. What these tourists experienced was unlike what they had been told.
However, as a researcher, the World Cup has also saddened me. Much has said about how Bafana have united a nation but I’m not so sure. It’s easy to wear a Bafana shirt and wave a flag but does it really mean that South Africans were united? If that was the case, that would even make me South African seeing as I wore my Bafana shirt and went crazy when Siphiwe Tshabalala scored that cracker against Mexico. Now that the flags are being taken down from buildings and off the cars, have things really changed?
The World Cup was a party in which people temporarily forgot their problems, but now the party is over and the problems are remembered once more. South Africans in Sandton and Soweto wore their shirts and waved their flags but have returned to their vastly different lifestyles. The World Cup may have caused people to feel South African but the vast injustices of inequality remain.
Who benefited from the World Cup financially? The World Cup was sold to the country by its government as something that would benefit all South Africans but once FIFA took its share of the profits, the government was left heavily indebted. Can anyone tell me how the stadiums in Polokwane, Nelspruit and Port Elizabeth are going be used seeing as there are no major sports teams there? Many ordinary South Africans believed that the World Cup was a great opportunity to make money but I’ve come across many who spent large amounts of money renovating their homes to accommodate tourists only for the tourists not to show. It was a surprise to many that not all the European tourists came with their pockets stuffed with cash. For many of us, it was difficult enough to get the money to fly out here in the first place. It’s going to take a long time to be able to afford to come back.South Africa, give yourself a big pat on the back. It was a wonderful World Cup and you have shown the rest of the world that Africa is not just a continent of famine, disease and war but a dynamic, vibrant, welcoming place too. It was a month-long carnival; a celebration of the beautiful game (although the beauty was difficult to find sometimes). Just don’t tell me that the World Cup was for the good of South Africa. I now return to England where the government there will be telling me that the 2012 London Olympics will benefit me. I doubt it will though. I don’t live anywhere near London...
By Marc Fletcher
