”The only South African representation at the Soccer World Cup will be the street-football team in the [Streetfootball] World Cup,” said Klemens Hubert, South African director of the German Technical Cooperation (GTZ).
An invitation to participate in the first-ever Streetfootball World Cup, to be held during the Soccer World Cup in Berlin in July, was extended to the Gauteng North Sport Council (GNSC) last month, in collaboration with GTZ.
The Streetfootball World Cup is an official element of the Artistic and Cultural Programme of the Fifa World Cup in Berlin and serves under the Fifa Football for Hope Movement. Twenty six regions from five continents have been invited, of which only five regions are from Africa.
Gert Potgieter, president of GNSC told, the Mail & Guardian Online on Wednesday that he couldn’t believe it when he received the invite a month ago.
”It was such a sensation to go back to the street-football structures [in northern Gauteng] and say, ‘We’re going to the World Cup’. It created such an emotional moment. Imagine what impact this will have on the communities, [including] the excitement and the self-confidence of the players,” he said.
Potgieter said the GNSC has committees in rural areas and townships in northern Gauteng that manage various street-football teams. Men and women of any age are allowed to participate in the sport.
In 2004, KickAIDS, a GTZ initiative that combined football matches with awareness- and information-events on preventing and combating HIV/Aids, motivated Potgieter to integrate the soccer-school concept into the GNSC’s youth-development programme.
”The team players that will be selected to go to Berlin in June will come from these teams in the township and rural areas,” he said.
”We compiled a programme called Life is a ball. It consists of four components. We use sporting skills to create an awareness of a clean environment, wellness, living an honest life, and we teach this through sporting skills,” he said.
A preliminary squad has already been selected for the Streetfootball World Cup. However, the final squad will be announced after the last trial on April 23.
Players will battle it out on a 25m-by-15m soccer pitch in Germany, which includes 1m-by-3m goalposts, with no referees and no rules, said Potgieter. ”The football must be as spontaneous as they play it in the street.”
Federico Addiechi from Fifa and the founder and managing director of the Streetfootball World Cup, Jürgen Giesbeck, who met with Potgieter on Tuesday this week, said they were impressed with the outreach programmes run by the GNSC in the traditionally deprived communities.
It is already confirmed that the second Streetfootball World Cup will be held in South Africa in 2010, during the Soccer World Cup.
”We’ve used soccer skills to create a platform to create awareness against the devastating dangers of HIV/Aids. Street football is a kind of culture and it exists in the streets, in the rural areas, everywhere,” said Potgieter.
The main objective of the South African team is obviously to win he said, and to ”meet new people and make new friends and have fun”.
The South African street-football team has no official sponsorship yet and are looking for sponsors, said Potgieter.
Klemens Hubert told the M&G Online that the basic idea of KickAIDS was ”to make sport something that attracts young people and takes them off the roads, keeps them busy and favours team spirit. We’re using football as a point of entry to make children aware of HIV/Aids.”
He said GTZ is trying to mobilise the costs of the flights for the team that will head off to Germany on June 27. ”We have committed ourselves to sending the team.”
Streetfootballworld stated in documentation sent to the GTC that the festival ”is a milestone event of the Streetfootballworld network. It is planned as a highlight of a four-year-cycle, where the worldwide ‘best of’ from ‘the other dimension of the game’ will get together and play for the [title of] Streetfootball World Champion.
”As a team sport, football reinforces values such as fairness and team spirit. Therefore, Streetfootballworld is committed to promoting grassroots and street football as an ideal tool to foster social development in all its facets.”
Streetfootballworld is a non-profit, non-governmental Germany-based organisation that seeks to promote the work of projects in the field of development through football.
The South African team is expected to depart to Germany on June 27 and the Streetfootball World Cup event will from July 1 to July 8.