Marketing Identity and Place: The Case of the Stellenbosch Kayamandi Economic Corridor Before the 2010 World Cup in South Africa

Abstract

Nowadays, sports are used to establish the identity of a place. From a tourist industry point of view, they contribute to increasing the cultural supply of a country, region or town. In anticipation of the 2010 World Cup and consequent flow of foreign visitors, the town of Stellenbosch in South Africa created a tourist site dedicated to football. The building, which was erected at the entrance to its township, Kayamandi, exhibited a Black-only version of football. This study includes an analysis of the failure of that tourist site through an approach of how it was received by the local football communities. The study of the football context in Stellenbosh, where several communities play football and African footballers are a minority in the township, of the creation of the tourist project, with a marketing choice in which the building is identified as hosting an exclusively Black football culture, and the meaning that the various football communities in the town give to the building and the symbols it carries – that football is the main sport or the property of the township businessmen alone – show the limited effects of using a sports identity as a lever for tourism. The results of this study show the weight of the local football communities in the failure of the project. Because the latter was exceedingly disconnected from the local sports context, it enlisted no support – neither from the majority football community, i.e. the Coloureds, nor from the African football community, who had divergent views on the matter, nor of the institutions that officially represent football in Stellenbosch, though they were the only ones who could have given a unified version of the project.