Bafana Bafana

If Sepp Blatter has done one good thing in his time in charge then it has been to make football more of a world game and get the lesser names involved. One of his main ways of doing this has been to award a World Cup to Africa, giving the Bafana Bafana a chance to impress on the biggest stage of them all. So have they impressed?

Without being there it is hard to argue a compelling point either way but I have formed a opinion from TV and attendance figures. The World Cup means an awful lot to the people of South Africa but FIFA have not allowed them to fully appreciate the tournament. It appears that tickets prices are far too high for the average fan in South Africa, leaving swathes of empty seats in the group games and even some knockout matches; the South Korea v Uruguay game had 5,000 unsold tickets! The situation is reminiscent of the Cricket World Cup in the West Indies a few years back where games were not even watched by one man and his dog.

But even when the crowd has been at capacity, and even when the Bafana Bafana have been playing, crowds have still left early. After Diego Forlan tucked away his penalty to put Uruguay 2-0 up on the hosts, huge numbers of the crowd were leaving. They couldn’t have realistically expected to win so I thought that was terrible and showed disdain towards FIFA. It is a festival of football to be enjoyed, regardless of how your team is doing. If the tournament does come to England, I can near guarantee 64 sell outs of happy and privileged fans (apart from when England are playing of course where happy fans will turn in to tense apprehensive but still privileged fans).

Has South Africa impressed? Well, I have been underwhelmed by the South African public in terms of inside the ground and will not pass judgement on the highly edited TV clips of normal South Africans. At least the world now has the Vuvuzela. In terms of actual stadia, they are superb and would be fit to hold any world competition so hats off there. But are they worth it in the long run? The South African Premier League’s average attendance in 2008/09 was 7,526. Well done to FIFA for making the game more global but I’m not convinced that it needs to be. Some countries have problems not even FIFA can solve.