[NYT]Legacy of World Cup May Be Stadiums Left Behind

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Japan and South Korea, the co-hosts of the World Cup finals, have gone on the biggest stadium building spree in the Cup’s 72-year history. Japan has spent about $4.6 billion to build six stadiums and to refurbish four. South Korea has spent about $2.7 billion to build 10 stadiums. In contrast, France, the last World Cup host, built one new stadium and refurbished the rest. The United States, the host in 1994, took a page from the money-making 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles and largely converted existing stadiums, often by taking down football goal posts and drawing soccer lines on the fields.

“What Japan has built for the World Cup is absolutely fiscal insanity,” said Marty Kuehnert, an American sports consultant and broadcaster based in Tokyo. “We will see most of these new stadiums go belly up.”

South Korea’s stadium strategy is to announce to the world that that fast-developing country is knocking on the door of the first world club. Branding itself as “Asia’s most-wired nation,” South Korea wants to impress the world with its high penetration rates for cellphones and high-speed Internet lines. South Korea wants to tell the world that Samsung’s DVD players are now on a par with Sony’s, and that Hyundai’s cars are on a par with Toyota’s.

Reflecting surveys indicating that baseball and sumo wrestling are Japan’s favorite sports, Japan today exhibits little World Cup soccer fever. In South Korea, where baseball is also king, professional soccer generally draws only about 3,000 people to a game. “There is little prospect for these stadiums to be managed adequately after the World Cup,” predicted Masayuki Tamaki, a veteran NHK television sports commentator.

June 2, 2002. By James Brooke(Sapporo)

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