In South Africa, where the Africa Cup of Nations starts on Saturday following its transfer from strife-torn Libya, the government is trying to drum up enthusiasm by summoning the delirious spirit with which the country hosted the 2010 World Cup. Promising "a lasting legacy for generations to come" and that "African football will never be the same again," the sports minister, Fikile Mbalula, unleashed his rhetoric to pronounce: "Sport is the biggest contributor to nation building and social cohesion … This is not about money; it is about recognition.
"Sport is said to be a national religion in South Africa. When our teams win, the country witnesses a cacophony of hooting cars, a trumpeting of vuvuzelas, banging of dustbin lids in honour of our victory."
The government still hails the World Cup as a historic landmark, when pre-tournament fears of crime and disorganisation gave way to the world watching a post-apartheid South Africa successfully host a grand football carnival with a smile on its face. Two and a half years on, with the country still riven by gaping inequality, poverty and social struggle, questions are sticking about whether the World Cup really did produce a lasting legacy worth the billions spent.
Of the 10 stadiums newly built or refurbished to world-class standards for, the government has said, £687m, several have struggled for a continuing use once the month-long tournament was over, and need continuing subsidies from hard pressed local authorities. While Fifa, which retains all the World Cup's television and sponsorship money, earned £2.2bn and returned to Zurich with a £394m profit, South Africa's own government report has assessed that the tournament cost the country more than £2bn.
In its 2010 Fifa World Cup Country Report, the government accepted the tournament cost money to host – Olympic Games and World Cups always do – but claimed South Africa did transform its transport and other infrastructure and will reap long-term "intangible benefits", from enhanced confidence and an improved global view of the country. "There are numerous unquantifiable benefits that will be realised by future generations, from changing the perceptions of the country and the continent," the government said.
However, Patrick Bond, director of the University of KwaZulu-Natal centre for civil society, a consistent World Cup critic, rejects the claim of "intangible benefits" to justify the massive investment required to host Fifa's tournament. He brands several of the stadiums white elephants – Cape Town's Green Point Urban Park, costing £2m a year in public money to maintain, still lacking a convincing occupant with rugby union's Western Province reluctant to move from its Newlands stadium, sticks out most starkly. Bond argues even the rail, road and airport upgrades, brought forward for the World Cup, do not have sufficient use to merit their cost since the crowds departed.
"A World Cup could be held at much less expense if Fifa looked at a society's needs and did not fetishise luxury," Bond argues. "The tournament gave us a dizzy high, but the hangover, the inequality we have here and social unrest over economic problems, is brutal."
The football authorities, as well as the government, strenuously defend the World Cup as a transformational experience for South Africa's people and the sport. Improving football is political; the divide between the status of mostly white, top-ranking rugby and cricket, and football, played and watched predominantly by black South Africans, is summed up by Mbalula: "One of the worst legacies of sport under apartheid is the dearth of football facilities in disadvantaged areas, and the complete lack of recognition and support by the apartheid government."
The South African Football Association, recognising it has a huge task to improve the game and its playing facilities, is seeking to raise money for development, around £20m a year for the next 10 years, a figure dwarfed by the cost of hosting the games.
Their plans include the modest aim of building one good all-weather pitch in each of South Africa's 52 regions and a coherent infrastructure for playing the game. The project will be part-funded by the World Cup legacy trust, on whose board Jérôme Valcke, Fifa's secretary-general, sits, and which has $100m (£63m) available in total for grant-funding.
Robin Pietersen, who moved from being chief executive of Safa to head the development plan, acknowledges there is extensive, difficult work to do, but argues that building sparkling new stadiums first was not getting the priorities extravagantly wrong. "Football fields are a great problem," he said. "In most townships and rural areas, facilities are very rough and rudimentary. But building the world-class stadiums was not in contradiction with that. It was a necessary equalising of football with the predominantly white sports of rugby and cricket.
"Football has an impact on the nation's psyche in a profound way and if taxpayers have to fund the stadiums, so be it. Obviously we want to try to reduce that over the years, and I understand criticism that we could have done better, but, unequivocally, hosting the World Cup has transformed football in South Africa."
Carlos Amato, a football writer for the Mail & Guardian and the Times in South Africa, appreciates the concrete improvements to the country's infrastructure and the stadiums, some of which, Soccer City in Johannesburg for example, are operating sustainably, with creative management and the crowd-drawing power of the best supported football clubs, Kaizer Chiefs and Orlando Pirates.
Amato says the "intangible benefits" of the World Cup are real, and recalls the joy with which South Africa embraced it. "There was a definite need to boost the pride of the country, and it did mean a lot to a lot of people that we pulled it off, that an African society could do that," he said. "It was very powerful emotionally.
"But now, I think most South Africans would say they would have preferred the money to be spent on schools, hospitals, roads. We have deep social stresses here related to inequality, we need a more inclusive society. The World Cup did show us what South Africa could become, but we are a long way from that."
Gary Bailey, the South African best remembered in the UK for being Manchester United's goalkeeper in the 1980s, will not entertain criticism of the legacy, whether for stadiums still requiring public subsidy, or questions about whether the country might have concentrated on other priorities. "For me there is one major point," he said. "There was huge doubt about whether South Africa could do it, whether we had made progress since democracy. Then when we hosted one of the best ever World Cups, it helped to sell Africa's capabilities to the world. It was well worth it."
That, in a nutshell, is why, whatever the audits weigh up about the costs and real impacts of hosting global sporting events, countries still queue up to host them. The power of the impact they have at the time makes it seem like detail to agonise too much over their legacy
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