Friday Five: Reasons why the World Cup is better than the Olympics

And so here we go, at last.

Nearly 34 months after the first qualifying game and 2,337 goals scored over 848 matches, the World Cup Finals proper kick off in South Africa today. The original 204 teams have been whittled down to 32, who will now battle it out over 64 matches, culminating in the final in Johannesburg on 11 July.

It’s business time, as Flight of the Conchords would say.

Football’s showpiece event inevitably invites comparisons with that other great quadrennial global sporting event: the summer Olympics. And comparisons this time are particularly apposite given that London will be hosting the Olympics in 2012, and that the English Football Association last month lodged an official bid to host the 2018 World Cup.

So which is one better? The World Cup, of course, and here are just a few reasons why….

The cost

The Olympics is always insanely expensive, and quite often does a good job of bankrupting the host city, or at least ruining its finances for a good spell afterwards. Ask Moscow, or Montreal, or Sydney, or Athens….

The finances for London 2012 are particularly laughable/ painful. Back in 2005, you might remember, the organisers promised us that the whole shebang would ‘only’ cost £2.4 billion; today the latest estimate is for a final tally of £9.3 billion. And there’s still time for that to go up even further, as every man and his dog look to climb aboard the Olympic gravy train.

The World Cup will likely cost peanuts in comparison, as most of the required stadia and infrastructure already exist. A new stand here and a lick of paint there, plus a few big screen TVs to allow fans to enjoy the action when they’re not at a match and voila, there’s your World Cup (see the official bid website for further details)

The World Cup will even likely turn a healthy profit, given the number of people that will visit the country and the television and gate receipts received. That is something you will be unlikely to say about London 2012, or virtually any other Olympics for that matter.

The legacy

A World Cup will mean some football stadiums being built from scratch and others being tarted up a bit. One thing is certain: they will all get used and be appreciated after the event, week in week out, by the hundreds of thousands of people who pay to watch professional football.