Fifa gives South Africa extra €78m for world cup

THE SOUTH African government has been given an extra €78 million from world football’s governing body to ensure the host nation’s preparations for the 2010 world cup are finished on time and to the standard required.

The additional funds for South Africa’s operational budget was sanctioned by Fifa after a number of competing teams expressed concerns over whether their training bases around the country would be ready by the time they arrived for the tournament, which begins on June 11th.

Fifa secretary general Jerome Valcke confirmed yesterday the organisation had agreed to provide South Africa with the additional funds at an executive committee meeting last March.

“We know we had to add some money for the team base camps where some teams were unhappy about the level of the services or the level of the pitches,” Mr Valcke told the BBC.

“That’s a cost Fifa took over to ensure that things were delivered on time. We have agreed the extra $100 million [€78 million] at the last executive committee, where I explained there will be some additional cost for the world cup to move [the budget] from $423 million [€333 million] to $523 million [€412 million].”

England football officials were said to be unsatisfied with their team’s high-altitude world cup base, particularly training pitches, at the Royal Bafokeng sports campus near Rustenberg, when they visited the centre last December.

However, after a further visit in February, the England football team’s Italian manager Fabio Capello said he was happy with the North West Province facility, which officially opened to the public last week.

Local organising committee chief executive officer Danny Jordaan yesterday denied the extra money given by Fifa was a “bailout”, or that the tournament would have been in danger of not going ahead without it.

“We pay for some things and they pay for other things, especially items that were not in our original budget. We still have 70 per cent of our money in the bank. We’ve always managed our finances well, as one can see by our annual reports, but this doesn’t mean that we’ll agree to pay for everything, like new camps and pitches,” he said.

Fifa stands to make $2.1 billion (€1.65 billion) profit from this year’s world cup – the majority of which comes from television revenue and sponsorship. Mr Valcke said the extra €78 million allocated would come out of that.

“Yes, it’s a lot of money, but just to be clear, we are not sitting on profit, all the money is going back to football. It’s also less than the Premier League and Uefa make from the Champions League.”

Since preparations for the tournament began, South Africa’s overall contribution from Fifa to help pay for staging Africa’s first world cup has risen to more than €930 million.

The local government has also paid a high price to host the event, spending €1.76 billion on building and redeveloping 10 stadiums alone, according to the latest figures.