South Africa, a nation with one of the world’s greatest contrasts between its rich and poor, which suffers one of the planet’s highest crime rates, will have spent $4.5 billion to build stadiums and infrastructure to host a World Cup that will do little-to-nothing to overcome poverty.
“South Africa has come alive and will never be the same again after this World Cup,” said Jacob Zuma, the nation’s president. But staging an Olympics didn’t save Greece from its credit crisis, barely enhanced vibrant Montreal’s standing as a world class city and didn’t make one out of Atlanta.
American cities no longer routinely surrender to the blackmail of sports owners demanding publicly-financed stadiums catering to a small percentage of that public. Economists who are not fans have plenty of data to argue how, if teams leave, tourists and locals alike will find other ways to recycle their disposable incomes for the greater community good.
People spend money on things they like. Sadly, not highest on that list of priorities is raising the overall standard of living, but if you love sports enough to take joy in seeing your city’s name on a uniform, you overlook the faults. And South Africa not only loves its games, but also has used them to purge its evil and bring itself together and into the world.
After several hundred blacks were killed in nationwide rioting swirling out of the rebellion in the black township of Soweto in 1976, FIFA expelled South Africa for its segregation policies. Only when apartheid was dissolved and South Africa’s soccer associations, previously divided by race and ethnicity, had united in 1992 was the nation permitted to host its first official international match. In 1995, President Nelson Mandela, freed from prison only five years earlier, put on the Springbok jersey of the national rugby team, the one most loved by white Afrikaners who had created and maintained apartheid. However, it was soccer, historically the game of the oppressed, which was a key to the door of the legitimacy among nations that the oppressors craved.
Thus no matter how much hypocrisy and corruption we have seen in international sports, no matter how much jingoism they promote and cheating they generate, there also is no question games have brought China and South Africa back into the world and may be on the way to returning North Korea, represented in this World Cup, too.
Unlike 1936 Olympic host Nazi Germany, South Africa kicks off today against Mexico a changed-for-the-better nation. Soccer, the world’s favorite game, was an incentive for its transformation, and remains a magnet bringing the planet together.
The United States doesn’t feel the need to be good at everything others play, even if it has the resources to do so. We have our own brand of football to captivate us, have done our missionary work in baseball and basketball and have invited the world to catch up.
But we must want to be good at what we call soccer, too, because, after not qualifying for the premier event in the sport between 1950 and 1990, we have made it six straight times. We have let go coaches when they haven’t produced results to satisfy our rising expectations and probably will watch our team play England tomorrow in unprecedented numbers.
If we’re not totally sure yet whether or not we love the game, we already know we don’t like losing at it, because the rest of the world has long felt the same. Ultimately, we craved being inside the same velvet rope as South Africa, a tribute to the power of the sport and this celebration of it.