NZ football unworthy
hree Ferns on the shirt
Jules Rimet still gleaming Thirty years of hurt
Never stopped me dreaming.’’ There’s a Kiwiana riff on Three Lions, the England football anthem by David Baddiel, Frank Skinner and The Lightning Seeds.
Well, all right, so there is only one fern on the shirt of the New Zealand’s women’s football team and the original women’s Fifa Football World Cup trophy strangely doesn’t have a name. But you get the point. This is a time of great hope and excitement for women’s football in New Zealand.
And we should all enjoy that. We should all celebrate. Don’t worry, be happy, because the one thing that we know about these big tournaments is that they tend to make the host nation happier. The buzz is infectious. There’s a ‘joie de vivre’ as the French fans found out when the 2019 Women’s World Cup was held in their country.
But that, ladies and gentlemen, is likely to be the only benefit that New Zealand will get out of the tournament. We hear from NZ Football chief executive Andrew
Pragnell; ‘‘The economic impact’s really big – around the $180 million vicinity.’’
And everyone else is pushing the same myth. Grant Robertson, the minister of finance, is justifying the $25 million of government investment through potential returns and publicity for the country. Shane Harmon, the chief executive of Wellington’s Sky Stadium, says, ‘‘I believe it will rival any event that New Zealand has ever held.’’
It’s a beautiful story, but it’s a fantasy. Do you not think that if the Women’s World Cup was really so economically valuable that countries would be queueing up to host it? Instead it came down to a two-horse race between us and Colombia. Not exactly the Kentucky Derby. That tells you all you really need to know about the tournament’s true worth.
Pat Garofolo, writing for Bloomberg, said that the economic effect of hosting a (men’s) World Cup is ‘‘as nonexistent as a foul on Neymar before one of his famous dives.’’ Garofolo pointed out that cities like Chicago, Minneapolis and Vancouver refused to host matches for their countries’ 2026 men’s World Cup bid because of financial concerns.
The host cities of the 1994 World Cup in America, the best attended in history, suffered massive cumulative losses running into billions of dollars. A study into the 2006 World Cup in Germany showed similar economic trauma. Garofolo concluded: ‘‘On everything from jobs to tourism, the effects of hosting were negligible, at best. There’s little reason to think the Women’s World Cup will be any different.’’
So little old New Zealand, as several of our commentators keep tiresomely labelling us, won’t be getting rich any time soon. But there is another reason for concern. By every sporting measure New Zealand simply does not deserve to be hosting this World Cup. In many ways its award is another shameful Fifa malfeasance.
Look at the evidence against New Zealand. At the start of the millennium Charlie Dempsey, New Zealand’s Fifa representative, was accused of corruption in helping Germany win the World Cup ahead of South Africa. Since then New Zealand Football has been a laughing stock. How mayor Andy Foster can say ‘‘Wellington has a proud football tradition’’ is quite beyond me.
The Olywhites were kicked out of the Olympics for fielding an ineligible player. Then Andy Martin, the former chief exceutive of NZ Football, described the World Cup qualifier against Peru as ‘‘like a war’’ and exhorted fans to behave badly towards our visitors.
This was followed by the dismissal of Tony Readings, the former Football Ferns coach, for suggesting progressive changes in a review. Andreas Heraf came in as