The football World Cup kicks off in Germany in exactly 100 days with the organisers determined to use the tournament to improve the country’s image abroad.
The organising committee has dismissed criticism about stadium safety, but the question of whether the army should be allowed to help the police reinforce security is still unanswered.
Germany is celebrating finishing top of the medals’ table at the just-completed Turin Winter Olympics, but the sporting world’s attention will now switch to the 64-match, month-long tournament.
It kicks off in the futuristic new stadium in Munich on June 9 when host nation Germany take on Costa Rica.
All 32 teams have chosen their training bases, with only Ukraine opting for the former communist east, but Germany hopes all of the country will benefit from the tournament, which is expected to pull in more than two million foreign visitors.
The optimistic slogan of the tournament is ”A Time to Make Friends” and the government and industry have joined together in a bid to show Germany in a new light.
An advertising campaign called ”Germany — Land of Ideas” is designed to attract an audience far beyond football fans.
”The World Cup is a unique chance to present our country to a wider public,” said Mike de Vries, who heads the campaign.
”We want to broaden the image of Germany and show a country that is open to the rest of the world, innovative and looking to the future.”
Germany cannot escape its past in the debate over security as it prepares to host the World Cup finals for the first time since 1974.
In the light of its Nazi past, Germany’s Constitution says that the army can only operate within the country’s borders in the event of a war or a catastrophe.
However, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said she can imagine soldiers being deployed for the World Cup to assist the police in security duties.
The head of the German football federation, Theo Zwanziger, warned that deploying the army would destroy the friendly atmosphere the organisers want to create.
”Tanks around the stadiums would not be in the spirit of things, in my opinion,” he told Die Zeit weekly newspaper.
”The mixture of police and military duties is dangerous. Our history has taught us that. And a World Cup is not in any way a reason to deviate from that principle.”
The 12 World Cup stadiums have been renovated or built from scratch at a cost of €1,5-billion ($1,8-billion), but a German consumer protection watchdog gave the organisers headaches when it claimed in January that there were ”serious deficiencies” in four of the venues.
The independent group said the Olympic Stadium in Berlin, where the final will be played on July 9, the Veltins Arena in the western city of Gelsenkirchen and Leipzig’s Zentralstadion in eastern Germany were poorly equipped to cope with a stampede in the event of crowd trouble.
And the Fritz Walter stadium in the southwestern city of Kaiserslautern was said to have serious fire-proofing faults.
The study sparked an angry reaction from the president of the organising committee, Franz Beckenbauer, who suggested the body stick to analysing ”face lotions, olive oils and vacuum cleaners”.
However, it was announced without fanfare this month that the Berlin stadium — originally built for the infamous ”Nazi Olympics” of 1936 and renovated for the World Cup — would be modified.
Twenty bridges will be built over a three-metre-wide moat which separates the stands from the pitch.
The organisers were also embarrassed by the cancellation of a pre-World Cup gala to have been held at the Berlin stadium.
World football’s governing body Fifa said it feared the pitch would not have recovered from the rock music extravaganza that was to have taken place on June 7, six days before the first match there.
But press reports suggested poor ticket sales were the real reason for the decision.
In contrast, demand for match tickets has far outstripped supply and most matches are likely to play to packed stadiums. – AFP
