Football-mad Germany is ready and willing to host the World Cup finals next year but minor problems are plaguing the build-up to the biggest sporting event in the world.
The glitzy draw in Leipzig on Friday will decide where and when the 32 nations will play in six months’ time, but the country has been ready for months for the biggest sporting event on its soil since the 1988 European football Championships.
The 12 stadiums range from the architectural wonder of the new venue in Munich to the impressively renovated Olympic Stadium in Berlin where the final will take place on July 9.
Some of the venues have suffered teething problems.
During the final of the Confederations Cup tournament in June the high-tech fabric roof at Frankfurt’s new €126-million ($148-million) Waldstadion tore in a thunderstorm, causing rain to pour onto the field.
In November sections of concrete at the Frankenstadion in Nuremberg, another World Cup venue, cracked under the strain of spectators jumping up and down.
Kaiserslautern’s Fritz-Walter Stadium was unable to host Saturday’s German league match with Eintracht Frankfurt due to cracks in the roof, but officials said they could be quickly repaired.
And the World Cup hosts were forced to promise to strengthen crowd control measures after Alexander Laas of SV Hamburg suffered a head wound when a drumstick was thrown by the visiting Cologne fans in a match at the AOL-Arena on Saturday.
”This is a warning light to the Organising Committee,” Fifa President Sepp Blatter said on Monday. ”Something must be done about crowd control.”
Safety nets are now set to be erected behind the goals at all of the stadia, but Wolfgang Niersbach, the vice-president of the World Cup Organising Committee, said fans should not worry.
”We will not panic and it has not reached the stage where a one-off incident can ruin our whole philosophy,” he said, adding that cameras within the World Cup stadia should be capable of identifying any hooligans.
”None of the culprits can disappear into the masses,” he added.
The trial of referee Robert Hoyzer, which briefly threatened to overshadow the preparations to host the tournament, was swiftly dealt with, the 26-year-old sent to jail for two years and five months last month for attempting to fix nine matches.
Thanks to extensive state funding — and the fact that all but one of the World Cup stadia is also home to a Bundesliga club — the tournament is likely to break even and will not leave behind any white elephants.
Chief organiser Franz Beckenbauer is overseeing a provisional budget of €430-million ($506-million), with around €200 million euros raised from ticket sales, and organisers are confident that the tournament will finish in profit.
Germany’s tourist industry meanwhile is bracing for the arrival of an expected 3,2-million visitors for the month-long finals. – Sapa-AFP