Germany’s Late Charge Stuns Africa
African soccer suffered a devastating blow Thursday when Germany defeated South Africa by a single vote, 12-11, for the right to stage the 2006 World Cup.
The quadrennial championship, launched in 1930, never has been played on the African continent, just as the Olympic Games never have been held there.
That was supposed to change Thursday when the 24 executive-committee members of FIFA, soccer’s world governing body, voted in Zurich, Switzerland.
South Africa was widely favored, but an intense campaign by Germany and the decision by one executive committee member, New Zealand’s Charles Dempsey, to abstain, cost South Africa the chance to make history.
The disappointment was palpable, and best expressed by Danny Jordaan, the South African bid committee’s executive director.
“Africa is a member of the FIFA family and a family can’t keep feeding one child and leaving the others to starve, which is what they have done today,” Jordaan said.
“The World Cup would have had a major impact on our country, our continent and our lives.”
Instead, the 2006 tournament will go to Germany, whose campaign was brilliantly orchestrated and led by 55-year-old two-time World Cup winner Franz Beckenbauer.
“I’m surprised,” Beckenbauer said. “It was a very close result. We’d hoped for this, but we couldn’t expect it.”
Beckenbauer’s lobbying during Wednesday’s final presentations clearly benefited from the presence of German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, who was the only national leader to accompany the bidding team to the voting.
Morocco was the first of four candidates eliminated when, in the first round of voting at the Messe Conference Centre, Germany polled 10 votes, South Africa six, England five and Morocco three.
“Some of the voters who were supporting Morocco went to South Africa and we don’t know why,” said Driss Benhima, vice president of the Moroccan bid. “There was pressure placed on the African vote by Brazil to choose South Africa, and that is not really fair.”
On Monday, Brazil dropped out of the running to throw its support behind South Africa in exchange for South Africa’s pledge to back Brazil’s bid to stage the 2010 World Cup.
In the second round of voting Thursday, Germany and South Africa tied, 11-11, with England getting only two votes and therefore being eliminated.
That set the stage for the crucial third vote, in which Germany emerged victorious on a 12-11 vote with one abstention.
Scotland’s David Will switched his vote from England to Germany and New Zealand’s Dempsey, 73, the lone Oceania representative on the FIFA executive committee, stunned everyone by abstaining.
If Dempsey had voted for South Africa, deadlocking the vote at 12-12, Joseph “Sepp” Blatter, the FIFA president, who--at least in public--had strongly called for the Cup to go to Africa in 2006, would have had the tie-breaking vote.
“[Dempsey] had promised us that, if England were eliminated before the final round, his vote would come to South Africa,” said South African bid committee member Emmanuel Maradas.
Irvin Khosa, the chairman of the South African bid committee, was even more outspoken.
“FIFA should investigate this,” he said. “I cannot understand how someone can vote in the first two rounds then opt out when the decision had to be made. He has betrayed the South African people.”
Ismail Bhamjee, a FIFA executive committee member from Botswana, said Dempsey had told the committee before the voting began that he would abstain on the advice of his lawyer.
“He said he had been accused of bribery and corruption and would not vote again after England were out,” Bhamjee said. “The committee were totally dumbstruck.”
Sources in Zurich told The Times that Dempsey had been under instructions from the Oceania Confederation to vote for South Africa after England was out of the running.
The South Africans also felt let down by the four Asian voters on the executive committee, all of whom sided with Germany.
“We have been badly let down by people we thought would understand our needs the most,” said Raymond Hack, general secretary of the South African Football Assn. “Asians, more than anyone, should have understood what the World Cup means to Africa. They have utterly betrayed us.”
The voting was preceded by a bizarre episode in which several executive committee members, including FIFA vice president Jack Warner of Trinidad, awoke to find that letters had been pushed beneath their hotel room doors offering money in return for voting for Germany.
The letters, signed by a man claiming to be part of the German campaign, were dismissed as nothing more than a hoax.
“The feeling of those members of the committee who received this letter . . . was that it was not to be taken seriously,” said FIFA spokesman Keith Cooper.
Originally, nine countries sought the right to stage the world’s largest single-sport event, but the field was reduced to the four finalists after several years of campaigning.
In the end, however, it was the final few hours of lobbying that determined the outcome.
“It’s the next few hours that are absolutely critical,” one FIFA official told Reuters on Wednesday. “Football politics is not like a general election in Britain or a presidential election in the United States.
“In those kinds of elections, a voting pattern is usually established among the population, and there are real clues to the likely winners. But this is a secret election among 24 men whose lives, politics and other personal and professional dealings are linked in a network of intrigue.
“Going into the final day, you could say that South Africa is slightly in front of Germany, or you could say they are neck and neck. Who knows?
“But what you can definitely say is that by the time everyone wakes up on Thursday morning, the deals will be done, it will be settled. It will all have happened overnight tonight.”
That appears to have been the case. South African officials realized even before the voting began that their chance of victory had slipped away.
“Last night [Wednesday] we were very optimistic, but right now things are not looking so good,” Gary Bailey, a member of the South African delegation, said Thursday morning. “If what we are hearing is correct, it’s very bad news, it’s all over.”
Soon, it was. Shortly after 2 p.m. in Zurich, Blatter announced Germany as the winner.
Even German Chancellor Schroeder, after praising the “tremendous job” of Beckenbauer, conceded he felt “a little regret” for dashing the South Africans’ bid.
South African President Thabo Mbeki said it was “a tragic day for Africa.”
Other African leaders were less diplomatic.
Obed Mlaba, mayor of Durban, South Africa, slammed the FIFA decision as “international racism,” and bid committee member Selwyn Nathan lamented that much of the soccer world still sees Africa as “backward.”
Said Beckenbauer, “The emotion was all behind South Africa. They had a very clever campaign that said, ‘We are a poor continent and the only one that has never organized a World Cup. Please give us it.’ That was a very difficult argument. We had an emotional opponent.”
There was some sympathy for the South Africans from Juergen Klinsmann, the former German national team captain who now lives in Southern California.
“Their argument that Africa should get it at last is perfectly valid,” he said. “I really hope they will get it next time.”
Hosting the 2006 World Cup might have meant as many as 150,000 new jobs for South Africa, where unemployment is nearly 30%. More than $4 billion in foreign and domestic investment in new infrastructure and services also was expected if the country’s bid had succeeded.
Meanwhile, Germany, which staged the World Cup in 1974 when the country still was divided by the Berlin Wall, can begin preparing for the 2006 tournament.
Sixteen cities are seeking to host games during the event: Berlin, Bremen, Cologne, Dortmund, Duesseldorf, Frankfurt, Gelsenkirchen, Hamburg, Hanover, Kaiserslautern, Leipzig, Leverkusen, Moenchengladbach, Munich, Nuremberg and Stuttgart.
Two sites already are known. The opening ceremony and game are scheduled for Olympic Stadium in Munich, and the final will be played in the Olympic Stadium in Berlin. Both are being extensively modernized.
Now, the same needs to be done with the German team.
Germany was knocked out in the first round of the recently concluded European Championship, its worst showing in a major international tournament. The situation prompted Beckenbauer to write a tongue-in-cheek column for the Bild newspaper.
“Now we need the World Cup even more,” he wrote, “because at least if we get it, we won’t have to qualify.”
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Staff writer Carol J. Williams, reporting from Berlin, contributed to this story.
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World Cup Voting
Votes by the FIFA executive committee on the site of the 2006 World Cup (nation with fewest votes each round eliminated):
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Round 1 2 3 Germany 10 11 12 South Africa 6 11 11 England 5 2 -- Morocco 3 -- -- Abstention 0 0 1
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