Five new stadiums have been built for the tournament (three new match venues and two new practice grounds), and five of the existing venues are to be upgraded.Construction costs are expected to be R8.4bn.
In addition to the stadiums being built and upgraded.
South Africa is also planning to improve its current public transportinfrastructure within the various cities, with projects such as theGautrain and the new Bus Rapid Transit system (BRT) titled Rea Vaya.
The country is also going to implement special measures to ensure the safety and security of local and international tourists attending the matches in accordance with standard FIFA requirements, including a temporary restriction of flight operation in the airspace surrounding the stadiums.
In 2005, the organisers released a provisional list of thirteen venues to be used for the World Cup: Bloemfontein, Cape Town, Durban, Johannesburg (two venues), Kimberley, Nelspruit, Orkney, Polokwane, Port Elizabeth, Pretoria, and Rustenburg. This was narrowed down to ten venues which were officially announced by FIFA on 17 March 2006:
As the host nation, South Africa qualifies automatically for the tournament. However, South Africa did participate in World Cup qualifiers because the CAF qualifiers also serve as the qualifying tournament for the 2010 African Cup of Nations. They were the first host since 1934 to participate in preliminary qualifying.
The qualification draw for the 2010 World Cup was held in Durban, South Africa, on 25 November 2007.
Qualified countries in green
List of qualified teams
The following 32 teams qualified for the final tournament :
FIFA considers these teams to have retained the earlier nations' records.
FIFA World Cup, occasionally called the Football World Cup, is an international football competition contested by the men's national teams of the members of Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), the sport's global governing body. The championship has been awarded every four years since the first tournament in 1930, except in 1942 and 1946
when it was not contested because of World War II.
The current format of the tournament involves 32 teams competing for the title at venues within the host nation(s) over a period of about a month – this phase is often called the World Cup Finals. A qualification phase, which currently takes place over the preceding three years, is used to determine which teams qualify for the tournament together with the host nation(s). The World Cup is the most widely-viewed sporting event in the world. 715.1 million people respecttively watching the 2006 final.
During the 18 tournaments that have been held, seven nations have won the title. Brazil are the only team to have played in every tournament and have won the World Cup a record five times. Italy are the current champions and have won four titles and Germany are next with three. The other former champions are Uruguay, winners of the inaugural tournament, and Argentina with two titles each and England and France, with one title each.
The most recent World Cup was held in Germany in 2006. The next World Cup will be held in South Africa, between 11 June and 11 July 2010, and the 2014 World Cup will be held in Brazil.
History
Previous international competitions:
The world's first international football match was a challenge match played in Glasgow in 1872 between Scotland and England, with the first international tournament, the inaugural edition of the British Home Championship, taking place in 1884. At this stage the sport was rarely played outside the United Kingdom. As football began to increase in popularity in other parts of the world at the turn of the century, it was held as a demonstration sport with no medals awarded at the 1900 and 1904 Summer Olympics (however, the IOC has retroactively upgraded their status to official events), and at the 1906 Intercalated Games.
After FIFA was founded in 1904, there was an attempt made by FIFA to arrange an international football tournament between nations outside of the Olympic framework in Switzerland in 1906. These were very early days for international football, and the official history of FIFA describes the competition as having been a failure.
At the 1908 Summer Olympics in London, football became an official competition. Planned by The Football Association (FA), England's football governing body, the event was for amateur players only and was regarded suspiciously as a show rather than a competition. Great Britain (represented by the England national amateur football team) won the gold medals. They repeated the feat in 1912 in Stockholm, where the tournament was organized by the Swedish Football Association.
In 1914, FIFA agreed to recognise the Olympic tournament as a "world football championship for amateurs", and took responsibility for managing the event. This paved the way for the world's first intercontinental football competition, at the 1920 Summer Olympics, contested by Egypt and thirteen European teams, and won by Belgium. Uruguay won the next two Olympic football tournaments in 1924 and 1928.
First World Cup:
Due to the success of the Olympic football tournaments, FIFA, with President Jules Rimet the driving force, again started looking at staging its own international tournament outside of the Olympics. On 28 May 1928, the FIFA Congress in Amsterdam decided to stage a world championship organised by FIFA.With Uruguay now two-time official football world champions (as 1924 was the start of FIFA's professional era) and to celebrate their centenary of independence in 1930, FIFA named Uruguay as the host country of the inaugural World Cup tournament.
The first two World Cup matches took place simultaneously on 13 July 1930, and were won by France and USA, who defeated Mexico 4–1 and Belgium 3–0 respectively. The first goal in World Cup history was scored by Lucien Laurent of France.[9] In the final, Uruguay defeated Argentina 4–2 in front of a crowd of 93,000 people in Montevideo, and in doing so became the first nation to win the World Cup.
