With the draw set for noon on Friday, the buzz for the 2010 World Cup is growing, especially in South Africa. As the host country, as a result of being the center of the planet’s attention for a month next summer, they can almost certainly expect many monies to come their way. In fact, I would guess that they can expect that the next World Cup will be an airplane dropping dollars on South Africa.
2010 World Cup And Why It’s Bad For South Africa
↵↵“The next World Cup will not be an airplane dropping dollars on South Africa,” authors Stefan Szymanski and Simon Kuper write in their new book “Soccernomics.”
↵↵Oh. Apparently, hosting a World Cup or Olympic Games doesn’t really do much to help revitalize a country, so says the authors in “Soccernomics,” a book that hopes to do for soccer what “‘Moneyball’ did for baseball: examine the game from the outside, using social science and academic rigor.” Examples of findings from the book:
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↵- Norway is the country that loves soccer the most. Per capita, it's also the best in the world at sports.
↵- Tournaments such as the World Cup stop thousands from killing themselves — no one can stop watching.
↵- According to 21 years of data, taking into account national income and population size, Honduras is the most overachieving country in world soccer and Canada is the most underachieving.
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↵↵Poor Canada. We always knew they weren’t good, but now it’s been proven by math.
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