A celebration of football

The 2006 World Cup in Germany: a well-organised tournament that will be best remembered for embracing fans who didn’t have tickets by providing facilities for them to gather and watch games in city centres

More than a week before the tournament had actually ended, Sepp Blatter, president of football’s governing body FIFA, had already declared that the 2006 Football World Cup was “the best…of all time”. Critics were quick to point out that the competition included several bad games, such as the dire 0-0 draw between Switzerland and the Ukraine; that the traditional stars, Brazil, played poorly; and that the final had to be decided by the cruel and almost random use of a penalty shoot-out. Being a former PR man, Sepp Blatter may have been over-hyping things somewhat. However, Blatter had a point in at least one respect – the organisation of the eighteenth World Cup was world-class.

The tournament will be remembered for its spectacular "Fan
Fests", where people without tickets gathered to watch games

The event ran so smoothly that it was praised by everyone from Danny Jordaan, CEO of the 2010 South Africa World Cup’s organising committee, to Kofi Annan, secretary general of the United Nations. It generated an impressive USD 200m profit, and witnessed few of the security problems for which international football competitions are infamous.

Germany won the right to stage the 2006 World Cup amid much controversy, beating South Africa by one vote, and only after Charlie Dempsey, the FIFA member representing Oceania, abstained. The result so disappointed the losers, South Africa, that one member of their bid team claimed: “This is a major, major blow to African football and Africa socially, politically and economically."

After this controversy had blown over, Germany’s local organising committee (LOC) was established on 1 January 2001. At its head was Franz Beckenbauer, a legendary German defender, the only player to have won the World Cup both as a captain and a coach. Originally based in Frankfurt Airport, the organising committee moved into the premises of the German football association, the team expanding from fifteen to hundreds of people.

Unlike most recent Olympics, the infrastructure was already in place. Rather than create a new stadium, as France did for the 1998 World Cup, or Wales did for the 1999 Rugby World Cup, the Germans decided to renovate the Olympiastadion, the venue commissioned by Adolf Hitler for the 1936 Olympic Games.

Supporters fill Munich Olympic Park at another "Fan Fest"

“Whenever you enter, you will still know this was the site of the 1936 Games,” chief technician Peter Steinhorst said in an interview with the BBC to mark completion of the project. “You will pass all the old Nazi sculptures. But there is also something new, and there will be multi-cultural events here."

Although the stadia were already in place, the LOC still had football’s most famous organisational difficulty to contend with – security.

The security issue was a complex one. Not only did the Germans have to make plans for potential football hooligans, they also had to contend with the nation’s small but potentially dangerous gangs of neo-nazis, as well as worry about terrorism (in total, five of the 32 nations taking part had suffered attacks from Al Qaida or like-minded militant Islamists). There was also a dangerous precedent for violence in German tournaments – during the 1972 Munich Olympic Games Palestinian gunmen killed 11 Israeli athletes.

"Although we have no particular signals about possible threats to the World Cup, we want to do everything humanly possible to safeguard the matches," interior minister Wolfgang Schäuble said before the tournament.

As a result of these fears, Germany’s security operation was enormous. More than a quarter of a million German police officers were dedicated to the tournament. Alongside them worked another 500 from thirteen countries, keeping an eye on their own fan groups. The German army provided 2,000 soldiers for technical support, and put another 5,000 on standby.

Alongside manpower, Germany rolled out an impressive array of new technology. Security squads in all 12 stadia were issued with fingerprint verification systems designed to identify troublemakers registered on police databases. The security cameras in Munich’s Allianz Arena (renamed “FIFA World Cup Stadium Munich” for the tournament) boasted 80 surveillance cameras powerful enough to read the souvenir programmes people were carrying.

The redeveloped Olympiastadion in Berlin hosted
several games, including the World Cup Final

By and large, the strategy seems to have worked; of the two million people who arrived in Germany for the competition, between 1,000 and 2,000 were arrested or held in “preventative detention” – a figure that German interior ministry spokesman Christian Sachs described as “extremely low”.

Not everything worked smoothly however – the ticketing system, which involved every ticket containing an RFID tag with the ticket-holder’s details on it, proved too strict, raising problems for people who had bought their tickets for friends, and in some cases it was virtually abandoned. FIFA security general Urs Linsi distanced himself from the system before the competition started, saying that FIFA doesn’t plan to “store as much data as the Germans” at future events, and the Austrians and Swiss, organisers of football’s 2008 European Cup, have already said they will not follow Germany’s ticketing procedure.
           
Complaints about tickets were not limited to security. One in six tickets went to sponsors, with each sponsor receiving double the ticket allocation that each competition nation was originally given. Even Franz Beckenbauer called ticketing the “one fly in the ointment”, admitting “nowhere is the number of tickets distributed adequate to meet demand.”

The controversy over allocation of tickets to sponsors highlights how far FIFA and the organising committee were willing to go to ensure the competition’s corporate backers saw a good return on their investment. The World Cup had fifteen “official partners”, each thought to have paid USD 40m, as well as thirteen “national partners”, who paid USD 13m each for local advertising rights.

In the past, sponsors had fallen victim to “ambush marketing”, where rival brands who had not taken out sponsorship advertised heavily during the tournament, giving the impression they were officially associated with the competition despite having paid nothing. As a result, FIFA and the tournament organisers used every technique they could to ensure that only official sponsors received a publicity boost from the World Cup.

Techniques ranged from renaming any stadium that was sponsored by a non-affiliated company (which is why the Allianz Arena became the “FIFA World Cup Stadium Munich”) to extreme measures. These included more than 1,000 Dutch fans being forced to watch a match in their underwear after being told to remove the lederhosen they had been wearing which had been given to them for free by Dutch brewer Bavaria, a competitor of Budweiser.

Sponsorship proved to be a tricky public relations area for FIFA. Besides the controversy over ticket allocation, there were complaints that too many sponsors had been signed, diluting the value for the sponsors and bombarding the public with advertising messages.

FIFA responded by announcing that the number of official sponsors would be cut to six for future World Cups. The continued use of McDonald’s and Coca-Cola as sponsors also attracted much criticism, due to the unhealthy image of both products. However, McDonald’s seems neither unhappy with the benefit it has been receiving from the World Cup or unhappy with the publicity it has been receiving – shortly after the tournament ended it announced that it would continue to sponsor the competition, at least until 2014.

While the areas of ticketing and sponsorship experienced hiccups, there were elements of the World Cup that were unqualified successes.

Previously, many large football competitions had discouraged fans without tickets from travelling to the games. However the German World Cup, with its slogan “a time to make friends”, took the opposite approach and organised “Fan Fests”, designed to provide supporters who could not attend the matches with a venue to watch the games and to celebrate. The Fan Fests were huge affairs – the Berlin Fan Fest, for example, occupied an area the size of twelve football pitches and used four huge display screens – including a 60m screen located directly above the Brandenburg Gate. Besides televised football, entertainment included DJs, classical music, and a nightly laser show. On some match days, Berlin’s “Fan Mile” attracted more than a million people.

The Fan Fests were hailed as a remarkable innovation. Danny Jordaan was so impressed that he is proposing a similar system in South Africa in 2010.

“Germany has extended the experience and celebration of the game beyond the confines of the stadium into the streets,” Jordaan said in an interview with FIFA’s website. "So, all of a sudden, you have a crowd, as we had in Berlin, of one million people gathering to celebrate football. Because of this, a new dimension has been added to the World Cup.”

Perhaps the biggest winner of the 2006 World Cup was national spirit. Patriotism remains a difficult issue in Germany, a country that was only formally reunited into its current state in 1990 and where consciousness of its role in World War II is part of the national mindset. At the start of the competition this lack of national feeling was exacerbated by low expectations for their traditionally strong national team, whose coach refused to have a permanent residence in Germany.

However, the effect of both a superbly organised competition and a better-than-expected performance from their national team rekindled a feeling of patriotism often absent from the country. "People are waving flags without having to justify themselves”, Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel said in an interview. “Fifteen years ago, things were different. Our relation to our country has become something beautiful, but in a normal and not an arrogant way."