FIFA profits beat players, people and planet

Despite the public relations drive to sell the idea that the staging of the World Cup football tournament in South Africa is beneficial to the country and people, it is evident, says Patrick Bond, that the rewards to society are outweighed by the burdens.

THE World Cupä is a formidable spectacle, not least because the world's largest sports audience tunes in. Sponsors plus broadcasters provide the main organising body, the Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), with a $3.2 billion profit over the course of a month, upon which it lives for the next four years.

At the time of writing, South Africa's hosting has gone off nearly flawlessly, contrary to predictions by Afropessimists, especially in the British press. Pre-Cup coverage featured, according to a Reuters correspondent, 'a sea of negative reporting ranging from serious to absurd. Prize for the latter goes to Britain's tabloid press which has variously reported that the streets are full of machete wielding gangs or that England's team, camped near the sleepy town of Rustenburg, are in danger from an army of deadly snakes including one that could kill two whole World Cup teams.'

According to FIFA general secretary Jerome Valcke, 'It's been a perfect World Cup. The number of foreign visitors and tickets sales were beyond expectations.' FIFA's profit increase over the 2006 games in Germany was at least 50%, he reported.

Burdens

Yet it is equally evident that aside from the unparalleled - albeit temporary - psychological boost, the rewards to society are outweighed by the burdens. For middle-class sports aficionados, complaints revolved around the winter weather and sounds of 50,000 vuvuzelas - the $3 plastic trumpet that can puncture eardrums - which over the past decade have featured in South African soccer matches but which prevent players from communicating.

Burdens are far greater for those attempting to reverse South African economic volatility, poverty and inequality, crime and violence, xenophobia and environmental degradation. According to critics, including more than 1,000 protesters who marched to Durban City Hall on 16 June, FIFA amplifies all these problems by compelling the host government to take all the risks and all the debt but receive few if any developmental gains.

For example, freedom of the press was lost, with journalists signing pledges not to throw FIFA 'into disrepute' - i.e., reporting in a way that 'negatively affects the public standing of the Local Organising Committee or FIFA.'

Confirmed South African Broadcasting Corporation spokesperson Kaiser Kganyago, upon refusing to screen the critical documentary Fahrenheit 2010: 'Our job is obviously to promote the World Cup and flighting anything that can be perceived as negative is not in our interest.'

FIFA also received special judicial treatment, with 24/7 prosecution of several dozen criminal incidents, including a three-year jail term for a man whose only crime was holding 30 FIFA game tickets 'without explanation', as FIFA tried to cut down on the black market. Two Dutch 'ambush marketers' were arrested as 36 women wore orange dresses, representing Bavaria brewery, to the Holland-Denmark game, though the firm's logo was tiny.

FIFA demanded that South Africa provide police specifically 'to enforce the protection of the marketing rights, broadcast rights, marks and other intellectual property rights of FIFA and its commercial partners'.

Cases of this sort made FIFA seem extremist, even 'fascist' as many put it. The loss of state sovereignty to FIFA surprises observers, given the enormous experience that former South African president Thabo Mbeki and his team amassed in world economic policy negotiations since apartheid ended in 1994.

Protests

Yet Mbeki allowed FIFA and multinational corporate sponsors full access to 'exclusion zones' with no taxes, no exchange controls and no security worries - until the first match in Durban when hundreds of disgruntled security guards went unpaid, protested and were fired on with stun grenades, tear gas and rubber bullets. Half the country's 10 World Cup stadiums suffered strikes as a result, and an expensive police replacement operation began.

FIFA had insisted on a protest-free zone, with regular police bannings of attempted marches - even an innocuous education-for-all rally - until sufficient resistance emerged to overcome the harassment. A few other victories were recorded along the way. Thousands of stadium construction workers fought for higher wages and often won. And AIDS activists prevented from distributing condoms at stadiums objected and won that right.

The most successful protest against the World Cup was by hundreds of Durban informal traders facing displacement from a century-old market. Were it not for sustained resistance over a year-long period, including a pitched battle with police, their space would have been transformed into a shopping mall, without them.

Less successfully, Durban's subsistence fisherfolk fought against their forced removal from piers at the World Cup Fan Fest park on the main beach. Johannesburg and Cape Town traders also lost their battle for space, due to the exclusion zones. And Cape Town housing displacees were shuttled into a bizarre, apartheid-style 'temporary' transit camp, Blikkiesdorp.

Workers lost insofar as they failed to gain local production rights for the Zakumi doll mascot, which was instead produced in what the trade union movement alleged were Chinese sweatshops where teenagers were paid $3/day.

Whereas township soccer facilities were meant to benefit from the World Cup, one insider - South African Football Association Western Cape provincial president Norman Arendse - remarked that FIFA's 'fatal' top-down approach left grassroots soccer with merely 'crumbs'.

Other losers included environmentalists concerned about the World Cup's vast carbon emissions - twice the 2006 record - and the South African government's attempt to 'offset' these through 'greenwashing' strategies such as the Clean Development Mechanism and inappropriate tree planting. Students in the eastern city of Nelspruit (Mbombela) lost their school to the stadium, and several poor towns' residents unsuccessfully attempted to leverage World Cup interest in South Africa to demand provincial rezoning.

Potential economic calamity

However, these were relatively small and atomistic attempts at alleviating immediate suffering. The macro-implications will be felt over many years, because the World Cup has worsened South Africa's world-leading income inequality and set the stage for future economic calamities once debt payments come due.

The overspending on new stadiums (in Durban, Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, Nelspruit and Polokwane) plus extravagant refurbishment expenses for the Soccer City stadium brought the state subsidy to over $3.1 billion. It will be exceedingly hard for nearly all the stadiums to even cover their operating expenses after the final World Cup game.

The most expensive, at $580 million, is Cape Town's Green Point, with 65,000 seats. It was a foolish and racist investment, for the existing soccer stadium in Athlone township could have hosted the semifinals with an additional layer of seats. But according to a FIFA report, 'A billion television viewers don't want to see shacks and poverty on this scale.'

Durban's 70,000-seater Moses Mabhida stadium, the $380 million 'Alien's Handbag' (according to comedian Pieter Dirk-Uys), is delightful to view, so long as we keep out of sight and mind the city's vast backlogs of housing, water/sanitation, electricity, clinics, schools and roads, and the absurd cost escalation (from $225 million).

Harder to keep from view is next-door neighbour Absa Stadium, home of the Sharks rugby team, which seats 52,000 and which easily could have been extended. The Sharks have said they cannot afford to make the move to Mabhida because of high rental costs, and a titanic battle lies ahead over destruction of the older stadium to force the issue.

An excess portion of the stadium bill came from unnecessary imports,  at a time when South Africa's foreign debt rose from the $24 billion Nelson Mandela inherited from apartheid to more than $85 billion today. Paying interest on the debt plus dividends to the huge formerly South African but now overseas-based multinational corporations - Anglo American, BHP Billiton, DeBeers, Old Mutual, SAB-Miller beer, Liberty Life, Didata, Investec Bank - pushed the country to the very bottom of the emerging markets rankings. South Africa's sixth post-apartheid currency crash (of more than 15% over a month's time) will occur sooner rather than later, as a result.

In addition to FIFA, other profiteers include the World Cup partners and sponsors which once supported apartheid. The Khulumani Support Group and Jubilee South Africa have taken the matter to the US courts through the Alien Tort Claims Act. Khulumani has begun its own red card campaign against corporate sponsors of the German and US teams who show up on the defendant docket: Daimler, Rheinmettal, Ford, IBM and General Motors.

Other FIFA partners which bought exclusive rights to monopolise commerce in the exclusion zones are Adidas, Coca-Cola, Air Emirates, Hyundai, Sony and Visa, while 'official sponsors' include Budweiser, McDonald's and Castrol.

Other indirect costs to the economy are also important to count. The World Cup was partly responsible for the country's construction bubble, which drove a  5% annual GDP growth rate from 2004-08, just as happened in the US prior to its crash. With the World Cup for rationalisation, the state's investment in new luxury transport infrastructure soared.

The $3 billion Gautrain rapid rail costs riders five times more than previously advertised, but it probably won't dislodge Johannesburg-Pretoria commuters, thanks to traffic jams and parking shortages at the new stations. As labour leader Zwelinzima Vavi put it, Gautrain 'does nothing for those who really suffer from transport problems - above all, commuters from places like Soweto and Diepsloot. Instead, it takes away resources that could improve the lives of millions of commuters.'

And the new $1.1 billion King Shaka International Airport in Durban was unneeded, by all accounts, given that the old one had excess capacity until 2017, and given the doubling of distance and taxi fares from central Durban.

At least one auditing firm, Grant Thornton, disagrees, arguing that about $7 billion in spin-offs can be expected, including 415,400 jobs, with tourist spending of about $1 billion. But this appears to be pie-in-the-sky, as the government's statistics office just reported the first quarter's loss of 71,000 jobs, with no prospect for improvement in sight.

Xenophobia

In this context of economic contraction, another dose of xenophobia is feared, from both the state and society. In May 2008, violence left 62 people dead and more than 100,000 displaced. Fearing a return of similar sentiments, the African National Congress national executive committee and the South African cabinet expressed concern about rising xenophobia.

Worryingly though, the police force general, Bheki Cele, replied that there is 'no tangible evidence' of xenophobia, and continued with a classic anti-immigrant generalisation: 'We have observed a trend where foreigners commit crime - taking advantage of the fact that we have an unacceptable crime level - to tarnish our credibility and image.'

But the main foreign culprits, taking a huge heist, are the Zurich soccer gnomes of FIFA. Still, for every trademarked FIFA logo, there can be found a culture jam, such as the 'Football And Freemarket Inc' FAFI transformation of a black soccer player inside Africa to a white FIFA official looting Africa of wealth (see image on p. 41).

Finally, while the Coca-Cola commercialisation of African music represents a huge problem, rising to the challenge are three excellent countercultural recordings, free for download:

   the Chomsky AllStars' 'Beautiful Gain', at http://chomskyallstars.bandcamp.com/track/the-beautiful-gain-full-version;

   Durban-based Ewok's 'Shame on the Beautiful Game' - http://soundcloud.com/creamy-ewok-baggends/shame-on-the-game-ewok-mp3;

   Dakar-based Nomadic Wax, with DJs Magee and Nio plus more than a dozen rap artists - http://nomadicwax.bandcamp.com/track/world-cup.

The question for Brazilian soccer-lovers and critics of multinational corporate rule is whether they will have greater success establishing countervailing pressure and reversing FIFA's power. Only with an antidote to commercialisation and foreign control can we truly call soccer the Beautiful Game.                              

Patrick Bond directs the Durban-based Centre for Civil Society, an institute dedicated to furthering the memory of South Africa's greatest political economist of sport, Dennis Brutus (1924-2009). Brutus was a Robben Island prison veteran; a critic of corporate athletics including FIFA; the primary organiser of the 1960s Olympic Boycott of white South Africa, of the expulsion of white SA from FIFA in 1976, and of 1970s-80s cricket, rugby and tennis anti-apartheid campaigns; a leading poet and literary scholar; a global justice movement strategist; and at time of death, a Centre for Civil Society Honorary Professor. Until his last breath, he opposed the World CupT  being held in a country characterised by what he termed 'class apartheid'.

*Third World Resurgence No. 237, May 2010, pp 41-43