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Overtime in Soccer City
Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP/Getty Images
Children play a pickup game with the stadium hulking in the background.
By EVE FAIRBANKS
Published: July 22, 2011
On the second Sunday in July, exactly one year after the final game of the 2010 World Cup was played here at Johannesburg’s Soccer City stadium, the cappuccino machine inside the V.I.P. suite was firing up. A bottle of wine cooled in the fridge across the bar. In the stadium’s bathrooms, fresh liners were tucked into the wastebaskets and the soap dispensers were refilled to the brim, as if the 90,000 fans that flooded the venue in 2010 might reappear at any moment. Ephraim Nong, a stadium tour guide, showed me the pitch from the V.I.P. viewing deck. It is maintained religiously, he said: cut three times a week, the grass in shadow artificially sunned using giant lamps hung on wheeled racks.
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“When was the last event here?” I asked.
“When was our last event?” Nong dropped his head. “Yeah, man, let me see. I think it was May.”
Outside the stadium, along Golden Highway, the stoplights were down, literally: some of them lay on the ground, while others dangled from their stalks like pay-phone receivers off the hook. On the road that led to the corrugated iron shacks of Soweto, a billboard declared: “1 Ball Can Change It All!”
It advertised the lottery, but it also summed up South Africa’s hopes for the World Cup. Many South Africans imagined that hosting the tournament would create big, visible benefits, turning the country decidedly, glamorously first world — normally the work of generations — nearly overnight. Dawie Roodt, a South African economist, forecast a “massive inflow” of foreign capital and a “massive increase” in tourism, but “I was completely wrong,” he said. There are some new roads, but one year later, South Africa is a similar country, still struggling with inequality and a fragile infrastructure. The day before my visit, in a neighborhood across Golden Highway, there was an electricity blackout, Nong told me. Residents protested bitterly. “There were tires in the road.”
In a recent poll, 70 percent of South Africans said they now believe the World Cup actually brought the country economic disadvantages. The 10 host stadiums are particular sources of dispute. When they were being built or refurbished, rock concerts and glammed-up local soccer games were cited as the potential return on the government’s $1.6 billion investment, but the concerts have been few, and some of the host cities don’t even have soccer teams.
So the stadiums mostly stand empty, already monuments. At Soccer City (since rechristened First National Bank Stadium), the honking of vuvuzelas has been succeeded by the twittering of birds. Several species roost in the rafters, and when there are no tours to lead, Nong gets to know them. “There are the tall ones with dark legs,” he told me. “And the ones nearly like flamingos.” He imitated their different noises: Glug-glug. Cluck-cluck.
And yet something lingers: a sense of pride, even of nationhood. I saw it in people’s clothes as I drove north from Soccer City. In Johannesburg’s Muslim quarter, a man with a long beard layered a shalwar kameez over track pants striped in green and gold, the national soccer team’s colors, which became fashionable during the tournament. Downtown, street vendors sold green-and-gold jackets; a woman shopper swaddled her baby to her back in a green-and-gold blanket.
In the same poll in which they lamented the World Cup’s economic disappointments, 78 percent of the respondents said they thought South Africa derived “social cohesion” from hosting it. “South Africa is still by default a divided country,” Roodt, the economist, said. This yields a longing for cathartic moments in which South Africans can come together and revisit the possibility of becoming a different kind of country. There hadn’t been such an event since the 1995 Rugby World Cup, dramatized in the movie “Invictus.”
My final-game anniversary ended in a poor area called Diepsloot, recently depicted in this magazine as a hotbed of resentment and violence. There is one spot there, however, that is free of such anguish, and that is the World Cup viewing park, upgraded before the games. Every Sunday, people still gather there to watch sports on the big screen or play mancala, a board game.
The World Cup spirit is more alive in that green square than it is in Soccer City, illustrating how real transfiguration often happens far from the cathedrals we build for it. Everyone I asked was adamantly happy that South Africa hosted the tournament. Some people even suggested the viewing park’s special peacefulness came from an aura of aspiration, a will to do better, that persisted from the World Cup. “We’ve got this park because of the World Cup,” said a boy named Lucky Kunene, who was sitting with his friends in a circle on the grass. “And there is no fighting in this park.”
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