Why's the international press digging for 2010 dirt?

Despite repeated requests by the LOC's spokesperson, Rich Mkhondo, to return to the agenda, members of the international press kept circling around the issues of security, and in particular the incident at the residence of the Egyptian team, as well as a number of alleged pick-pocketing incidents at the stadium. Even after the last round of security questions had been concluded and Mkhondo had pleaded for a short comfort break, a number of 2010 pundits kept poking at the crime issues.

A case of brand-jacking?

This begs the questions, what is the true motive for this obsessive focus on alleged security breaches and how should organisers best respond to this?

It was Donald Trump who once said that “if you don't manage your brand, somebody else will do that for you, and that somebody will most likely be your competitor.” For quite some time, South Africa's brand image has been subject to various forms of brand-jacking by certain sectors of the international press, a practice not uncommon to the constant questioning of Barack Obama's character by Fox Networks while he was running for president.

Interestingly, South Africa is not alone in being subjected to constant undertones of competitive stereotyping - most recently, it was none other than her very own world cup host predecessor, Germany, which suffered a similar fate on the hands of the UK tabloid media.

‘Totally divorced from reality'

In the run-up to the 2006 FIFA World Cup, internal relations analyst Matthias Matussek summed up all that was wrong with Britain's image of Germany. The British, Matussek wrote, were only interested ‘in Nazi Germany'. They had ‘zero interest in the new Germany'. According to this ‘primitive image' of Germany cultivated by the British, the Germans were either ‘frozen-faced engineers' or ‘Nazis'.

In conclusion, Matussek asserted that Britain's view of Germany, Europe's most populous nation, was ‘totally divorced from reality'.

Commercial envy behind hostility?

During a visit to London in 2005, Germany's then foreign minister Joschka Fischer made the same point. His generation had no idea how to perform the ‘goose step', he said bitterly. He added that he was dismayed by the fact that British television showed so many Second World War films.

Matussek sought to explain Britain's perennial hostility towards Germany on the grounds of post-war envy. After winning the Second World War the British had to hand ‘back their colonies… and withdraw to a small island in the North Sea.' Britain went steadily downhill ‘to a state of economic ignominy that lasted well into the 1980s'. Germany - the war's big loser - became the world's ‘no 3 economic force,' Matussek asserted.

Exposing the German chancellor

Thus, in the months before the tournament, the omens were inauspicious. British press articles in April and May 2006 suggested that UK coverage of Germany would default to clichés deployed in previous major football competitions - most notably the 1996 European Championships hosted by England. Here, the Germans were portrayed as Nazis.

It was in 1996 the Daily Mirror ran its notorious front-page headline: ‘Achtung! Surrender! For you Fritz ze Euro 96 Championship is over', next to photos of two England players in tin helmets. The Mirror's editor Piers Morgan even planned to drop copies of the paper by Spitfire over the German team's HQ, as well as sending a tank to the office of Germany's Bild newspaper.

Just two months before the 2006 kickoff, The Sun put the boot in again, this time publishing paparazzi photos of Frau Merkel's bottom as she got changed next to a swimming pool on a holiday in southern Italy. Under the headline: ‘I'm big in the Bumdestag,' The Sun declared: ‘German leader Angela Merkel has pulled up her country's economy - now she's pulling up her pants.'

‘We are always the Nazis'

Bild, Germany's biggest-selling newspaper, responded with outrage. On 21 April 2006, the paper's star columnist Franz Josef Wagner attacked ‘whisky-faced' Sun journalists, and noted that for the British: ‘We're always the Nazis'. The previous day, Bild had reported the story with the headline: ‘The English scorn our chancellor.' The paper asked rhetorically: ‘Where does this hate come from?”

Why the 2010 spite?

Indeed, where does the 2010 spite come from? Judging from the frowns of certain media representatives present at the LOC's briefing, the thought that SA might be able to host a truly memorable FIFA World Cup, by merging effective event logistics with the unique African flair, might raise the specter of things unheard to many - the prospect of spelling the end to European domination of the world's biggest sporting business and opening the floodgates for a new, younger, formidable competitor on the battlefield of global eventing.

After all, if 2010 goes off well, the Olympics might be next in heading down south, and this would certainly ring warning bells in certain quarters of established nation brands. As George Orwell once said, “sports is shooting minus the war.” Now is the time to pull out the PR armory and outgun the 2010 ambush critics.