South Africa is World Cup craziest!
12 June 2006
One of the reasons Fifa chose South Africa to host the 2010 Football World Cup is South Africans' evident passion for the beautiful game.
This is borne out by a global Synovate survey released on the eve of the 2006 World Cup in Germany, based on research among 8 075 respondents in South Africa and 13 other countries - with South Africans topping the list of those most likely to:
- rearrange their day in order to watch the World Cup games;
- use the World Cup as an excuse to avoid their household chores; and
- call in sick at work in order to watch matches during working hours.
According to Synovate, the majority of the survey's respondents - 58% - said they did not normally follow football, but would make an exception for the World Cup.
Far from merely making an exception, 71% of South Africans said they would rearrange their day in order to watch the World Cup games.
The next month could also be characterised by messy homes, with 52% of South Africans saying the World Cup was a good excuse for avoiding household chores.
Other nationalities vying for top place among shirkers: the Serbians at 43%, the British at 41%, Brazilians at 40%, Czechs at 39% and Argentines at 37%. (The Japanese and Swedish, at 10% and 12% respectively, emerged as the most dutiful.)
More worrying, perhaps, for South African employers: more than a third (38%) of South African respondents said they would call in sick at work in order to watch matches during working hours.
South Africa's women will be watching too, though for different reasons! According to the survey, 51% of South African women follow the World Cup because they like watching men in shorts - second only to Brazilian women at 62%. (Japanese and Korean women, at 4% and 9% respectively, came bottom of the voyeurism stakes.)
South Africans also led the field of those who said they would have loved to have been a soccer player (63%) - with Brazilians coming a distant second at 43%.
Bafana Bafana fare less than well
Not surprisingly, then, given also that South Africa's national soccer team failed to qualify for Germany - and haven't been up to beating just about anyone lately - South African respondents displayed a large amount of disillusion with Bafana Bafana.
Most South Africans described their team as "all talk, no action" (43%) or "whingers, whiners" (8%) - as opposed to "exciting, pulsating" (16%), "clinical and efficient" (4%), "posh, high class" (8%) or "dark horses, outsiders" (10%). (Four percent went for "thugs", 7% for "don't know".)
South Africans weren't the only ones to write off their own team, however - the "all talk, no action" sentiment was shared by the Poles (65%), Germans (41%) and French (40%).
Some respondents were even less complimentary, with 15% of Czechs, 11% of Koreans and even 9% of Brazilians viewing their sides as "thugs." And 11% of Germans and Serbians, along with 9% of the British, wrote off their teams as "whiners" - although it must be noted that Synovate did not filter out Scottish, Welsh and Irish supporters from the UK respondents!
The Japanese were far and away the most patriotic, with a mere 7% not believing their team was either "exciting, pulsating" (68%), "clinical and efficient" (14%) or "posh, high class" (10%).
Who will win?
Even if they were feeling patriotic, South Africans didn't have the luxury of being able to vote for their own team when it came to the big question of who would win the tournament.
South Africans' leading vote went to Brazil (50%) as the top contender for the World Cup trophy, followed by Germany (20%), England (10%) and France (6%).
Interestingly, this lined up fairly closely with the overall response: Brazil were seen as favourites by 42% of those surveyed, with hosts Germany a distant second at 10%, followed by Argentina, England, France and Sweden.
Partisanship was evident in some countries, with respondents in Brazil, Argentina, France and the UK seeing their own teams as favourites.
Interestingly, however, Germans favoured Brazil over their own team by a margin of almost two to one.
Globally, almost half of the respondents predicted that Brazil's Ronaldinho would win the Golden Ball awarded to the competition's most valuable player - backed by 58% of South Africans.
Other contenders trailed far behind: France's Zinedine Zidane and Thierry Henry polled 4% each (with the former favoured by 20% of his country's fans), followed by Argentina's Lionel Messi and England's Wayne Rooney each with 3%.
SouthAfrica.info reporter
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