Struck by World Cup questions SA failed to ask

* HILARY JOFFE | Wednesday June 2, 2010 00:00

One is this: why did we spend so much time worrying about whether SA was competent to host the World Cup, but not nearly enough worrying about the competence of FIFA, and particularly its sidekick,  Match?

The stadiums are finished and they look beautiful, even if some of them will never be used again. The first leg of the Gautrain is ready to roll. The roads and public transport networks are being speedily completed, even if some of the buses were bought only at the last moment, and with a bit of planning and some decent management the fans will be conveyed to and fro as needed. Last minute some of it may be, but SA will by next week have delivered what it promised, and more.

Not so Match. The things that have gone the most horribly wrong are the things that Match controls - most notably the ticketing. No one is going to forget the crashing computer systems and the long queues that went with Match's belated effort to sell tickets over the counter to the hundreds of thousands of South African fans who stepped in enthusiastically to buy those tickets after Match failed to sell them to foreign fans. Nor that the computer debacle happened not once but twice.

Then there are the hotel rooms and airline tickets that Match dumped on to the market at the very last minute: tourist industry operators who were brave enough, or stupid enough, to contract with Match, despite the tough conditions it imposed and the 30 percent commission it's reported to take, might have forgiven the agency for the fact that the expected hordes of foreign tourists didn't materialise. What annoyed so many, though, was that they were endlessly messed around.

That touches on a second question: why did we seem to focus so much on what to do with all the people who were going to come to the World Cup -- and so little on getting them to come? Where was the strategic marketing campaign targeting the countries from which SA most wanted to attract tourists and made sure our hosting of the tournament could be leveraged to the maximum?Not that there's any very clear evidence on mega events and their benefits for tourism. A study by European tour operators a few years ago on the 2012 London Olympics concluded that 'there is no strong link between hosting sporting events and increased tourism'.

Attendees at the Olympics displace normal visitors and scare tourists away for some time, it found, and even successes such as Sydney did not see significant tourism benefits.

Here in SA, mega sporting events haven't generally scared other tourists away, but they haven't always brought hordes of new tourists in either. A study by the University of Stellenbosch's economics department finds that hosting these events can lead to increased visitor numbers, especially from participating countries, and that yields benefits in higher tourism revenues. But the study, which looks at five rugby and cricket tournaments held in SA over the past 15 years, finds that a couple of those had no significant effect on tourist numbers.

Getting them here, in other words, requires effort. Extracting longer-term benefit requires even more. The World Cup is complex to market, given that qualifying teams are selected only shortly before, and that the tournament runs for a whole month. SA has the added disadvantage of being far from most participating countries. And there was the effect of the financial crisis. But much of it was way out of SA's control anyway.

FIFA and Match called the shots, on tickets and airlines and hotel bookings - and that had perverse results so that, for example, no South African (or other African) travel agents offered packages because they would have been required to put down large dollar deposits, and many of SA's high-end hotels refused to contract with Match, so the packages that were on offer abroad often had expensive tickets, but unattractively mediocre accommodation.

Whether the conditions SA agreed to in its enthusiasm to stage the World Cup were any more onerous than other countries' is not clear, but the constant (if implicit) threats, through 2007 and 2008, that FIFA would take the tournament somewhere else tended to have an intimidating effect - which perhaps is why SA ended up building more and fancier stadiums than it originally agreed to, and why what FIFA wanted, FIFA got.

The government's own infighting and indecision couldn't have helped either. Too late, perhaps, we realised that we should have been more assertive, that SA should have done much more to turn the tournament to its own account.

More tourists would have meant more direct economic benefit this year but that was never the major benefit the World Cup had to offer. And though the tournament was a catalyst for building public transport and other 'legacy' infrastructure, that isn't necessarily the main benefit either.

What SA really stands to gain if the World Cup goes well is a boost to its reputation that could be of huge value in the longer term.Not enough has been done in the past five years to use the tournament to redefine the way SA is perceived. But we have a whole month of being constantly on the world's TV screens.

A lot could go wrong in a month. But a lot could also go right, if we work at it.

* JOFFE is senior associate editor. (BUSINESS DAY)