South Africans are confident that the 2010 Soccer World Cup will bring increased job opportunities and improved economic growth to the country, according to a survey conducted by the Human Sciences Research Council.
Respondents also believed that the tournament would consolidate South Africa’s position in the international arena.
However, respondents were almost equally divided whether these expected benefits would be of a ”lasting” or ”short-term” nature.
About 47% believed the benefits of hosting the event would be long term, while 44% said the benefits would be short-term.
About 2 884 respondents across the country were polled during the latter half of last year.
The survey probed the expectations of respondents for the country as a whole, the city or area in which they lived, their neighbourhood and, finally, for them personally.
While respondents consistently opted for job creation and work opportunities as their predicted primary benefit of hosting the 2010 World Cup, they did so at different rates across these domains.
Job creation was an expected benefit at the national level for 34% of respondents, at the city level for 28% of them, and at the neighbourhood level only for 15%.
But 33% of the respondents expected to gain personally from the World Cup.
Interestingly, this figure was matched by an equal number of respondents who said they did not expect to receive any personal job creation benefits.
The data reveals that public knowledge of the event is high, especially in urban areas.
Three quarters of respondents knew South Africa had been chosen by Fifa to host the tournament, of whom 93% correctly said it would be held in 2010.
But knowledge dropped rapidly when respondents lived in tribal, former homeland areas, or in rural towns or commercial farms.
Only 44% of respondents in the latter areas said they knew that South Africa would host the event.
But even then the overwhelming majority of these particular respondents could correctly name 2010 as the year in which the event would be held. – Sapa