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South Africans see themselves as a nation that loves sport, but with the World Cup in football imminent, there appears to be a sense of exhaustion both in the media and among the population. One important reason is that football does not dominate the public imagination of sport, as cricket and rugby do. The game is played and loved in the black townships, the fortunes of African football-playing nations are followed devotedly, and players such as Didier Drogba have a larger-than-life standing in the country. But football has not become a metaphor for the nation, as rugby and cricket have become. Whether this reflects a racial affiliation alone is hard to get at, because the local team, Bafana (which could be genially translated as “the boys”), are eighty-eighth in the FIFA rankings, without a ghost of a chance of winning the Cup, while at rugby and cricket, South Africa are world beaters.
1 Clare Benit-Gbaffou, “In the Shadow of 2010: Democracy and Displacement in the Greater Ellis Park Development Project,” in Development and Dreams: The Urban Legacy of the 2010 Football World Cup, ed. Udesh Pillay, Richard Tomlinson, and Orli Bass (Cape Town: HSRC Press), 209.
2 See “SA Official Gunned Down,” BBC News, January 5, 2009, http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/africa/7812113.stm (accessed May 5, 2010).
3 See Libby Porter, Margaret Jaconelli, Julian Cheyne, David Eby, and Hendrik Wagenaar, “Planning Displacement: The Real Legacy of Major Sporting Events,” “‘Just a Person in a Wee Flat’: Being displaced by the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow's East End,” “Olympian Masterplanning in London,” “Closing Ceremonies: How Law, Policy and the Winter Olympics Are Displacing an Inconveniently Located Low-Income Community in Vancouver,” “Commentary: Recovering Public Ethos: Critical Analysis for Policy and Planning,” Planning Theory and Practice 10, no. 3 (September 2009): 395–418; and Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions, “Fair Play for Housing Rights: Mega-Events, Olympic Games and Housing Rights,” 2007, http://www.cohre.org/mega-events-report (accessed May 5, 2010).
4 Pillay, Udesh and Bass, O., “Mega-Events as a Response to Poverty Reduction: The 2010 FIFA World Cup and Its Urban Development Implications,” Urban Forum 19, no. 3 (September 2008): 335.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
5 See Cornelissen, Scarlett, “China and the 2008 Beijing Olympics: The Dynamics and Implications of Sport Mega-Events in the Semi-Periphery,” The China Monitor 18 (2007), 4–5Google Scholar; Cornelissen, Scarlett and Swart, Kamilla, “The 2010 Football Cup as a Political Construct: The Challenge of Making Good on an African Promise,” Sociological Review 54, suppl. 2 (2006): 108–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Matheson, Victor and Baade, Robert, “Mega-Sporting Events in Developing Nations: Playing the Way to Prosperity?” South African Journal of Economics 72, no. 5 (December 2004): 1085–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar