Quote:
Originally Posted by
geysir
What were the truths and what was the garbage content?
I do appreciate an objective critique? :)
I quite like this line
'The trick every four years is for the usual corporate bandits to fool the local population into believing this World Cup is theirs. And then to depart with the bill still on the table.'
Quote:
The stadiums here cost two billion rand more than they were supposed to and the host cities got to pick up the excess tabs
. I'd love to see the source for this, both for the amounts and the assumption that the host cities pick up the tab.
Quote:
Yet, for instance, Cape Town had wished to revamp the existing Athlone Stadium to host its World Cup Games. Athlone Stadium. Fifa did not approve. The surrounding area was too depressingly run down. TV wouldn’t like it. In Durban, a 56,000-seater World Cup stadium was constructed a couple of hundred yards away from the existing Kings Park Stadium, which holds 50,000.
Very true on Durban especially, the Athlone site is completely unsuitable, actually Newlands was in the original bid document but WP Rugby who own it refused to allow the necessary changes to make the stadium suitable for a semi-final, thus the new stadium was built for the sole purpose of hosting a semi-final. That said it's in a much better location than Newlands which is in a quiet residential area and suffers from chronic parking & public transport problems as well as the lack of opportunity for expansion because of the effect on local housing.
Quote:
Speaking of coming from a very long way away, the South African tourism industry was rubbing its hands at the prospect of attracting over three million tourists in their winter season.
No figures are available yet but every hotelier and taxi driver you speak to expresses disappointment.
More rubbish, the original forecasts were for 5 to 6 hundred thousand revised down to 450 when the recession hit, estimates have the number of tourists between 450 & 500. I know a few people in the trade and they have been happy with the business, I've said elsewhere on this site that Match screwed over a lot of people and I think the Tourist Industry here was Naive and too trusting but in general there have been a lot of tourists spending a lot of money and having a good time, which is what everyone wanted.
Quote:
Africa has seen worse obscenities so some perspective is necessary but with 355,000 unsold tickets left in a country where the host population had neither the money nor the infrastructure to be ordering them online, the South African government (never the parasitical Fifa) were forced into buying huge swathes of tickets for their own people and selling them at hugely subsidised rates.
Again where's the source on this because frankly there were nowhere near that amount of unsold tickets, empty seats maybe but Corporate sponsors left thousands of seats empty. I have to say I have never heard that the govt stepped in to buy tickets and then sold them on at a loss & it frankly seems incredible. I think there may be some confusion between the WC & the Confed Cup the previous year where local Govt back sponsors bought huge numbers of tickets that weren't being sold because A) they were massively over-priced and B) No one really cared about the Confed Cup..
The points about FIFA basically taking the top but leaving the bill is pretty spot on FIFA and their umbrella organisations have done good and bad but they were never going to be left with anything other than a massive profit and the clampdown on local traders made the area around the stadium feel clinical and un-African. The local organising committee to their credit tried to give traders the opportunity to trade outside of these zones, the fan walk in Cape Town seemed to become more relaxed as the tournament went on and more and more street vendors were popping up.
