SA: the one night stand

South Africa is the young undiscovered actress hanging onto the arm of a famous, distinguished, yet burdensome, man. He needs her for his image and to play host to his needs. She needs him to boost her career, to draw the spotlight on her lovely, undiscovered face.

She endures the weight of his arm on her shoulder in exchange for the attention she is granted simply for being by his side. She enjoys the little flirtations (read: tourists) and dreams of bigger commitments (read: investments).

It's not a real date. A real date would mean the gentleman would do some homework before engaging with the future starlet. He would have lightly researched her needs, characteristics, likes and shortcomings so he would know how to behave around her. But since he's simply going to walk away at the end of the evening, there was no need for that.

Fifa never tried to understand SA. It never tried to understand the market or the citizens here.

The soccer governing body demonstrated this lack of comprehension twice. These two telling days were on 16 April and 28 May, but before that came the ignorant ruling that tickets for the World Cup, happening in SA, could only be purchased by locals via the Internet or using credit cards, to which many South African citizens do not have access.

Never mind the small amount of South Africans that possess credit cards, it is simple enough to find figures on Internet penetration in SA. Currently, Internet penetration here is only at about 10%. Simple mathematics with a little bit of logic will tell one that this means 90% of locals were excluded from initial World Cup ticket sales.

Arrogance, apathy or ignorance are the choices Fifa has in selecting a reason for this inexcusable fail. However, it could also opt to select a final answer, which is “all of the above”.

For this near-sightedness, SA merely rolled its eyes. The obvious lack of interest and research didn't come as that great a surprise.

The obvious lack of interest and research didn't come as that great a surprise.

Farzana Rasool, journalist, ITWeb

The line of thought from the soccer powers probably went something like: “Ah, it's Africa. We can use the old lion-ate-my-homework excuse there. It's viable.”

Anyway, for South Africans this was just the way things worked. The big surprise came though, when locals got first-hand experience of how things didn't work.

Fifa finally woke up when it realised it still had 500 000 tickets to sell and it was already the middle of March. That's when it decided to open the floodgates, but just not enough.

Ticket sales were taken into supermarkets, banks and over the counter at official ticketing centres. It was the first time ticket sales were open to the 90% without Internet access and without credit cards.

And Fifa still managed to be surprised by the high volume of fans that decided to take advantage of this change in regulation. Fifa failed.

The system crashed and fans were left in queues for hours, after some spent the night at sales points in order to secure places at the front of the lines and get done early. The system crashed and violence broke out as people fought over places in the line and became more frustrated with the long, unexplained wait. The system crashed and Fifa had no answers. The system crashed and Fifa was surprised.

The large number of people should have been expected. At most, Fifa should have anticipated that all allocated sales points would be running at the same time. Since each system can only process one customer at a time anyway, it's unclear why the high volume of people affected the system.

Like a Movie Magic rerun, the whole fiasco, unbelievably, happened again.

Fifa decides to make an additional 90 000 tickets available to South Africans on 28 May and apparently forgot to check that whatever went wrong the last time was actually fixed for this time.

Fifa was surprised all over again.

It's a simple enough process: you choose a country to host the World Cup. You do some homework on the chosen country. People living in the country which will host the World Cup want to attend some of the matches. To do this they need to purchase tickets. As an organiser, you need to make those tickets available to them via a channel they can actually access.

I would never expect Fifa to have read the entire textbook on SA and to have become an expert by now, but couldn't it have at least read the intro?