Big game players
So, the teams are well drilled and fully prepared for whatever is thrown at them as the tournament unfolds — but we aren’t just talking footballers. The host nation’s FM operation is ready to deliver a triumphant World Cup finals
By Nick Martindale
As South Africa and Mexico kick off in Johannesburg on June 11, it will mark the culmination of six years of intense activity in anticipation of the 2010 World Cup. While the governing body Fifa may run the tournament itself, the majority of groundwork has been put in by the South African government and the local organising committee. The government itself has spent a total of 33bn Rand (£2.9bn) on the construction of new stadiums, including constructing or rebuilding five new stadiums and upgrading a further five existing arenas, all of which require a vast range of FM services and expertise to ensure the tournament goes without a hitch.
As is often the case with international events of this scale, however, not everything has run smoothly. Fifa’s general secretary Jerme Valcke was forced to admit in March that costs on the Soccer City — the venue for the opening game and also the final on July 11 — project had come in some 1bn Rand (£80m), or 50 percent, over budget and the infrastructure around the stadium remains some way off completion.
The World Cup is predicted to pump £1.9bn into the South African economy and create 159,000 new jobs
In May it was revealed that Fifa had sanctioned an additional £78m be given to the South African government — taking its overall budget for the tournament from £333m to £412m — to ensure the training facilities were completed on time, after many teams expressed concern over their ability to deliver. The South African team were even forced to switch their training base late in the day after concerns over the progress being made at the planned site in Johannesburg.
Ticket sales for the event have so far been disappointing, too. South Africa has been working on the basis of around 500,000 people coming to the World Cup; this is now predicted to be closer to 300,000.
There have, however, been some notable successes. The Cape Town — or Green Point — Stadium was handed over to the town’s executive mayor ahead of schedule in December 2009, although it too was reported to be in the region of 1.5bn Rand (£120m) over budget. On the FM side, those charged with running the stadiums and the other associated events — such as hospitality suites and sports parks — have had to develop foolproof strategies to ensure they can deliver the service that is expected of them in areas such as catering, cleaning and maintenance (although Fifa retains control of security in stadiums on match days).
Confronting power issues
One of the biggest issues facing FM providers ahead of the World Cup is South Africa’s temperamental national power supply. Just over two years ago, the country suffered from rolling blackouts caused by inadequate maintenance of the network and outages at major events are not uncommon.
Andrew Mason is managing executive, professional services, at Total Facilities Management Company (TFMC), which will be responsible for — on behalf of the South African telecommunications giant Telkom — running two data rooms in each of the 10 stadiums that will enable the games to be broadcast on television across the world.
“Backup power is very important so we have standby generators not only on the stadium sites but also on all of the 146 routing exchanges,” he says.
“We have teams assigned to make sure that if there’s a power break then the standby generators will kick in and if they don’t then there are mobile generators as well, so we have a backup to a backup.”
Power is also a concern for Ronald Nothnagel, director of FM consultancy WSP Group, which is responsible for most facilities — including power — at the Peter Mokaba Stadium in Polokwane, Limpopo.
“All the stadium lights will be run directly off a generator and will not be dependent on the council supply,” he says. “The rest of the stadium will be fed from normal council power with a generator as the backup.”
Ronald Nothnagel is director of WSP Group, one of the few FM consultancies to be directly involved in the tournament, which provides a range of hard and soft services for the Peter Mokaba Stadium in Polokwane, Limpopo, using external providers. “Our biggest challenge was to make sure that there were proper contracts and service level agreements in place, and to look at the capabilities of suppliers in terms of their ability to cope with the demand,” he says.
Match fit
Match Hospitality — a Fifa rights-holder for the match hospitality programme — started working well in advance with staff from large national providers. “In our tender document we explained which companies we wanted to work with because there’s not too many in catering that can actually do this,” says Peter Csanadi, head of marketing and PR. It has subsequently trained up an army of 6,000 caterers to ensure they come up to its required standards.
“If you start 18-24 months out so they realise what the job is then they can do it, because it’s not difficult,” says Csanadi. “It’s a big investment because it obviously costs less money to put in ads to look for cleaners but the outcome will be terrible.”
The unique requirements of a World Cup present additional challenges for FM practitioners, notably the fact that the deadline is set in stone and that there is no long-term relationship with service providers to encourage them to do as good a job as possible. “A long time before the event the balance of power is very much in favour of the organiser because lots of suppliers want to participate but the closer you are to the day, the greater the power of the suppliers,” says Emmanuel Hembert, head of sourcing consultancy AT Kearney’s global sports and entertainment practice, who has helped organisations working on previous World Cups in France in 1998 and Japan and South Korea in 2002.
Squad numbers
The sheer profile of the World Cup and criticality of the services being delivered also mean providers tend to increase prices, says Nothnagal. “Getting a certain guarantee to meet a required service level always comes at a premium,” he says. “They have been putting forward what we believe are acceptable prices but they are certainly not the day-to-day price of running a normal facility.”
Another potential headache is that certain commodities are affected by sponsor deals between organisations and Fifa. One example of a sponsor-controlled product is beer, with Budweiser the only one that will be available to people in the stadiums.
This kind of monopoly can create capacity issues as well; manufacturer Anheuser-Busch InBev NV hopes to sell 3.4m litres inside the grounds but recently announced it would not take up its right to supply exclusively to the 10 fan parks across the country — depriving it of up to seven million customers — with suggestions from the industry that this is due to an inability to meet the demand. Instead, local companies will compete to supply beer on an unnamed product basis. Other items such as technology and soft drinks are also affected by sponsor deals.
Passing range
There is also considerable pressure from both the government and the organising committee to use local suppliers, and this is enhanced in South Africa through the Broad Based Black Economic Empowerment Act, which was introduced by the government in 2004 with the aim of distributing wealth across as much of society as possible. Cliff Hocking, president of the South African Facilities Management Association and an FM consultant with ECH Solutions, says the World Cup has created a greater interest in joint ventures between established service providers and smaller business from local communities.
“This could potentially create a new wave of service providers coming out of these joint ventures,” he says. “You might find an established medium-sized cleaning operator going into a joint venture with a black economic empowerment enterprise and coming out as a very credible player in the cleaning industry. That would be a plus because the bigger the credible pool of service provider is, the better it is for the FM industry going forward.”
Csanadi says his company has tried to source locally wherever possible but points out there are not enough specialist providers in any host nation to meet for the demands of a one-off tournament such as a World Cup. “Even in catering we’re working in joint ventures with local companies where they provide the infrastructure, the facilities and most of the manpower and are joined with international companies who have the World Cup know-how,” he says. “It works absolutely fine.”
Back in form
Yet Herbert Mkhize, acting CEO at the Proudly South African campaign group, says the World Cup has been a difficult experience for many local businesses. “Initially we were too excited, to the point that we forgot that the World Cup is merely a project of Fifa and all that we were doing was providing the venue and the facilities,” he says.
Sustainability has also been a factor. The Cape Town Stadium, for example, includes a water-cooled variable refrigerant volume cooling system (rather than air) which enables just small parts of the stadium to be cooled on non-match days or the whole venue when games are on. It also features an optimised remote building management system, which allows all plumbing, drainage, heating, ventilation and air-conditioning to be controlled from a single point. All taps and showers are low-flow, while the roof is used for rainwater harvesting.
Nothnagel, though, points out that sustainability from a facilities operation perspective still has some way to go in South Africa. “It’s always something that is taken into consideration,” he says.
“But we haven’t found it to be a specific high level requirement or a minimum standard set. Green building is still quite a young industry in South Africa.”
In addition to the stadiums, 20 centres of education, public health and football are being built across Africa as part of the Fifa’s 20 Centres for 2010 campaign, 5 being in South Africa
Whoever returns home with the Fifa Trophy on 11 July, FM will have a role to play long after the final whistle has sounded on the World Cup final, believes Hocking. “The benefit to the industry will be at contractor and service provider level more than at integrated FM service provider level,” he says. “But the opportunities going forward should increase because there will be pressure on the stadium management companies to make stadiums available, particularly the new ones, and to try and keep them at some level of profit. That could create tremendous opportunities for the FM industry.”
Nothnagel, though, has yet to be convinced. “The risk is that they will not attract enough events to constitute continued investment at a top level for FM management services so it will become a case of maintaining the facility to an acceptable standard but keeping the cost efficiency as low as possible,” he says. Just like the tournament itself, it seems as if there’s all to play for.
Nick Martindale is a freelance journalist
