World Cup 6 Finale

The world has been cajoled into believing that we absolutely have to have FIFA to enjoy international football. An insider tells me that ten years ago the branding gurus advised FIFA to equate itself with the World Cup. Hence ‘The World Cup’, became ‘The FIFA World Cup’ and with even less shame they added the slogan ‘For the good of the game; for the good of the world’. Happily the South African World Cup has shown that it’s about much more than the organisers and their branding consultants.

There were huge reservations expressed about the ability of this country to take on this event. Could it provide the facilities? Would they be ready on time? Would people come? Would they be safe? Would the local people come to the matches? Would the country’s infrastructure be able to handle the complex logistics? Barring some last minute catastrophe, it would now seem that South Africa has confounded its critics, in and outside the country, by competently managing the most-watched World Cup ever.

How has it managed this? The first and most obvious thing is that there is in fact plenty of often unacknowledged experience here in organising international-scale sports events. There are some less obvious reasons, one to do with play itself. Schoolchildren have official and unofficial games. The official ones are those outmatches played against other schools. These days there is even commercial sponsorship in school sport, with large signs boasting that the facilities have been donated by such and such a company. Despite all this, there survive those many and varied games (some of which kids invent themselves) that take place in the playground and which are played partly for sheer enjoyment and partly because they are simply theirs, and belong to the sub-culture of the young. Ironically even Fifa implicitly recognises this in its township-kids-kicking –a-ball-in-the-street type of advertising.

Of course someone has to coordinate the World Cup if there is to be one. It’s the ultimate set of outmatches, if you like, and as in a school, someone has to arrange them. (However when I was a teacher in the 1980s I don’t remember colleagues doing it for extra money). And because club soccer has become such a lucrative industry it would be surprising if the World Cup were untainted by the commercialisation that has taken hold in the game at the club level. The question is whether the spirit of the sport, and the event as a whole, can survive this profit and advertising-driven tendency to make it into a business or industry.

Well, at this World cup, despite the inevitable commercialisation and the sponsorship-wars, despite the semi-subliminal flashing of the FIFA logo across our screens, and despite Fifa’s social message that it is going to solve the world’s woes – this nation and African Continent have risen above FIFA’s pretensions to own the game and even the host country. Ordinary citizens and visitors have ensured that the world has enjoyed a riveting and festive event. This was symbolised by many local touches. There was the popularity of the local flag – something that was beyond the proprietary claws of the trade-mark owners. There was the way Johannesburg and Cape Town relented at the last moment and allowed informal traders to breach the FIFA exclusion zone. There were the elegant celebratory dances of African players when they scored. Less elegant was the vuvuzela, but it was significant that even FIFA, despite its misgivings about this producer of plastic flatulence, realised that it was part of the overwhelming local exuberance that it wasn’t going to be able to control. So South Africa effectively uncoupled the identification of the tournament with the organisers and their sponsors. It did so by infusing it with a local sense of celebration, an unaffectedly warm welcome and a pure love of the game.

Hospitality has perhaps been the key factor in the Cup’s success and it was colourfully illustrated by the traffic-light flag vendors who made available, not just South African flags but the colours of all 32 nations. Given the painful memories of the violent xenophobia perpetrated by a frustrated minority in 2008, it has been gratifying to have had the warmth of South Africa’s openness to the world noted in the international press. A rather moving example was by Shari Cohen of the Huffington Post (South Africa Rolls out the Ubuntu in Abundance). Writing from a South Africa that she describes as ‘the cradle of civilization’ Cohen says that America has much to learn from Africa ‘in terms of living as a larger village; and as human beings who are interconnected with each other, each of us having an effect on our brothers and sisters’.
Reflecting back on the opening ceremony, which celebrated the origin of humankind in this continent with a series of human footprints moving out of a map of Africa to the rest of the globe, it struck me that FIFA missed out on a great slogan for this first African World Cup - Welcome home!