The South African tourist authority’s plan to sponsor the English Premier League Team, Tottenham Hotspur, was confirmed last week. The declaration of the deal has ignited a large amount of public outrage in South Africa.
The controversial deal of the South African government with Tottenham Hotspur is worth about $58 million (R1 billion). The deal has been conditionally approved but not yet finalized.
But South Africa is today experiencing a national crisis, with frequent power outages paralyzing all aspects of daily life from policing to manufacturing infant formula to running oxygen equipment and keeping corpses preserved.
These power outages, referred to as road shedding locally, are implemented by the state-owned energy company Eskom to prevent a grid breakdown. Cyril Ramaphosa, the president, is thinking about issuing a disaster declaration.
Due to this situation and the negative response of the public to the plan’s unveiling, the minister of tourism said that Lindiwe Sisulu is set to unplug.
According to reports, the South African Tourism Board has proposed a 36-month sponsorship collaboration with the English club Tottenham Hotspur. This was revealed through a PowerPoint presentation with the logo of South African Tourism.
According to the presentation, the sponsorship agreement between South African Tourism and Tottenham Hotspur FC would be worth a total of $42.5 million over three years. This amount is equivalent to R10,9997,814.75 in South African rand or just under a billion rand.
President Ramaphosa would announce the agreement as a special flourish on February 10 during his State of the Nation Address.
Tottenham Hotspur is the 8th most valuable football club brand internationally. As per the presentation, the club is the team that Captain Harry Kane of England plays for and is more commonly referred to as Spurs.
It states that by entering a sponsorship agreement with the Premier League soccer team, South African Tourism would be following in the footsteps of other Destination Management Organisations (DMOs), which advertise places as vacation destinations.
It adds a warning and includes sponsorship of Manchester City by Abu Dhabi, Manchester United by Malta, and Arsenal by Rwanda as examples of transactions that are comparable.
Some experts said that if South African Tourism does not seize this chance, a rival DMO will take the opportunity to acquire the club.
The latter presentation tells about the exposure of the plan. The exposure South African Tourism will receive includes stadium branding, match-day advertising, a 5-14 day training camp with the entire first Spurs team in South Africa, as well as complimentary tickets and stadium hospitality.
The $42.5 million agreement could be extended for an additional year and would last from as early as February 2023 to June 2026.
According to the presentation, South African Tourism will obtain media exposure of $277 million, or nearly R6 billion, in exchange for this R1 billion investment.
South African Tourism claimed in a statement on February 2 that as the nation’s tourism industry recovers from the Covid-19 pandemic, sponsoring Tottenham would ostensibly help to convert the fans and spectators into tourists. This would enable the achievement of the government’s mandated goal of 21 million international visitor arrivals by 2030.
While the domestic market has recovered since the pandemic, luring back foreign tourists has been more challenging. The South African tourism industry crashed during the COVID-19 pandemic, with its contribution to the GDP of the country more than half in 2020.
It’s not a new concept to use football sponsorship to increase international travel. In 2018, the controversial start of Rwanda’s sponsorship of Arsenal took place. According to South African Tourism, this sponsorship led to an 8% rise in travel to that nation.
In the meantime, Club Deportivo Leganes of Spain’s Segunda Division and Malawi’s Ministry of Tourism, Culture, and Wildlife reached an agreement last month for Club Deportivo Leganes to serve as one of their alternating primary sponsors.
By selecting to sponsor Spurs, South African Tourism intends to reach the one billion Premier League-watching homes worldwide and gain access to the UK market, which is the third-largest supplier of foreign tourists to South Africa.
The intentions were made public, which the tourism board lamented, but there was a backlash from numerous sources, including the government.
After the intentions were revealed, Enver Duminy, Ravi Nadasen, and Rosemary Anderson, three members of the South African government’s board resigned.
However, the government’s opponents provide a different justification for the proposed agreement, portraying it as a costly fig leaf while load shedding continues to negatively impact every aspect of South African daily life and the country’s tourism industries are still working to recover from the pandemic.
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The Congress of South African Trade Unions mocked the agreement as a misguided vanity project, while the opposition Democratic Alliance blasted it as a waste of money that could have funded more than 33 million liters of fuel to power Eskom, over 10,000 additional undergraduate student’s scholarships, and nearly 5,000 additional police officers.
The idea was also labeled another glitz and glamor tactic by Tourism Minister Sisulu, to leave a mark in tourism before the prospective displacement to another department in a soon-to-be-revealed cabinet reshuffle, by Manny de Freitas, the DA Shadow Minister of Tourism.
To find out the status of the contract and whether any money had been transferred, Freitas said that the DA would send a team to Spurs this week.
According to OUTA, a non-profit organization fighting corruption, tax fraud, and bad administration, the government was urged to provide detailed information and transparency.
It was also noted that the proposed deal appears to go against South Africa Tourism’s stated strategy of shifting from a marketing focus to a more robust support of the tourism sector.
People out there in South Africa are heavily criticizing South African Tourism for making such a plan to sponsor the English club with a huge amount while the nation is under an economic crisis.
The political pressure is increasing on people like Sisulu, who will eventually seal the deal as South Africans wrestle with the issues surrounding its acceptance.
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