R31 Million for a World Cup Trip, While 41% of Schools Have No Sports Facilities

South Africa spent nearly R31 million sending officials and entertainers to the World Cup while 41% of public schools have no sports facilities at all. That is not investment. It is a failure.

Photo by Peter Glaser on Unsplash

Written by: Jodie Chatterton

In 2009 I wrote an opinion piece on my frustration with the Minister of Sport at that time, and it seems nothing has changed.

At the beginning of this year, my Dad and I drove from KZN to the Western Cape. Instead of taking the highway, we drove another route which took us through many rural areas. Do you know what I noticed? When it was the end of the school day all the children went home. No sport. Where were all the politicians?

I wrote then that quotas are an easy thing to do as they were made from the comfort of a boardroom, with no sweat involved. Seventeen years later, I could republish that piece word for word and it would still be true. And now we have a new number to look at and illustrate exactly how out of touch our current Minister of Sport is and that is - R30,945,370.15.

That’s what the Department of Sport, Arts and Culture spent sending a delegation to the 2026 FIFA World Cup. This paid for exhibition spaces in Mexico City, Atlanta and Monterrey, official match tickets, a Legends exhibition match, and travel for a delegation of officials, supporters, influencers and artists. The Minister feels all this spending is necessary as an investment to promote South Africa and that it cannot be done over Zoom.

Do those in the department actually appreciate what R31 million means? It shows how out of touch those in public service can become when they are spending other people’s hard-earned money. What could R31 million buy? What facilities could be offered?

What one could get for R31 million

A basic basketball court in South Africa costs somewhere between R160 000 and R300 000 to build; levelling, a concrete base, a hoop, some paint. A netball court is much the same. R31 million spent on a World Cup delegation is one trip. R31 million could also provide over 100 multipurpose courts at schools that have never had any facilities. I use basketball as an example because the courts do not require much space and other than a ball and hoop very little equipment is needed and they can be multipurpose spaces.

Another way to look at is; the Department’s own annual conditional grant for the entire country’s School Sport Programme is around R220 million a year. One trip cost roughly two months of the whole nation’s schools-sport budget and this was spent watching soccer instead of enabling it.

The children that could have benefited

According to the Department of Basic Education’s own infrastructure system (EFMS) in 2021 43% of the schools had no sport facilities. Its latest report, from August 2025, shows 9248 of the country’s 22381 public schools have no sports facilities at all, that is 41.3%. In five years, and after losing nearly 900 schools from the count altogether, it has improved by less than two percent. That is not progress, that is failure.

Eastern Cape sits at 58.1% of its schools with nothing (2901 of 4990) and KwaZulu-Natal at 54.1% (3110 of 5753). Compare that to North West at 20.4% and Gauteng at 24% - a child in the Eastern Cape is close to three times more likely to attend a school with no sport than a child in North West. Netball is the only sport offered at more than 40% of schools nationally (44.9%). Soccer follows at 38.3%. After that the numbers drop dramatically - rugby 6.3%, cricket 6.5%, athletics 5.9%, hockey 3.6%, swimming 2.6%, squash at 0.3% (67 schools in the entire country). Some you understand, a swimming pool is a huge expense and comes with a lot of maintenance, but athletics at 5.9% is the most insane of all of them. It needs almost nothing. Rural schools sitting on the most beautiful natural cross-country terrain in the country don’t even have that.

Two-thirds of South Africa’s schools are no-fee schools. Some are struggling to keep the lights on. A budget for sport in many of these schools would be considered a luxury when there are still schools with no library or even a computer.

Sport is not just about producing professionals. It teaches discipline, teamwork, how to lose without falling apart, how to win with grace, how to belong to something bigger than yourself and most of all to have fun. It’s one of the most effective tools we have against exactly the things the Minister himself has built his public story around; his own path through crime and prison, and the addiction and hopelessness that many children in the country succumb to daily. He is currently not doing enough in the area where it is needed the most.

Compare that to hockey

While the department funded retired footballers to fly out and play an exhibition match, South African hockey players have had to fund their own way to World Cups, most hockey players have to have a job in order to represent their country. Meanwhile there was apparently R31 million available for a trip for officials and retired players.

Even if the trip had legitimate official purposes, the level of expenditure appears difficult to justify when many South African athletes struggle to secure funding to compete internationally and many schools lack basic sporting facilities.

Does this office even need to exist?

I think we have 2 options:

1. Scrap the position entirely. We need to reduce the size of the government and this is one department that is not a necessity. Allocate the budget where delivery on the ground has to happen and send the funds straight to facilities and federations. The Minister’s salary alone would pay for around 15 multi-purpose courts.

2. Keep it but trim it. No more international “branding” trips, no hospitality budgets. A small, focused office where the minister’s performance is measured on facilities built and programmes funded and not appearances at tournaments.

Right now, the role looks like a very expensive jol for someone who never has to personally pay for the flight, the hotel, or the ticket. If you earn your money and want to fly business class, that’s entirely your business. But this isn’t your money. It’s a civil servant’s job, funded by taxpayers who are, in many cases, struggling to keep their own lights on. The public deserves evidence that the scale of the cost is justified. It is difficult to see why the same benefits could not have been achieved at a far lower cost.

Government is not the only one who has a role to play here

I don’t think every one of these problems needs government funding to wait to solve, because it’s too easy to make this only about what the government has failed to do.

If your child’s school has no sport, you don’t have to wait for the government. Get the other parents together. If it’s a rural school ask a local farmer if he will level a patch of ground. We have mowed our local farm school’s soccer field for free over the years. I doubt we are the only ones. When roads nearby are being re-tarred, ask what happens to the leftover tar (in a higher trust society this would be easier), that could be a basketball court’s worth of surfacing that costs the school nothing. Organise inter-school matches. Ask the local taxi drivers (Saturdays they are less busy) to transport children to other local schools. None of this needs the government, it needs people willing to contribute.

And what many people in poorer communities have, even without money, is time. Unemployment in these areas is part of why no-fee schools exist in the first place, you may be unemployed and have no money to contribute but it also means you may have afternoons free. A parent who can’t contribute financially can volunteer to coach their child’s soccer team. That is putting into your child’s education in other ways, that is communities coming together to invest in their own schools. And we need communities to start building them up and investing in them because that is the foundation of a functioning civil society.

The distraction

We spend an extraordinary amount of energy looking for or creating problems at the country’s well-resourced schools; a comment mishandled, a controversy over language or identity, a teacher sneezing incorrectly - while thousands of schools with nothing at all barely register a headline. It is far easier to have an opinion about a private school’s latest controversy than to sit with the fact that 41% of this country’s schools have no sport.

I said in 2009 that it was time politicians got to work and did their jobs. In 2026, I could still make that same statement. The problem hasn’t changed. Only the latest price tag on how out of touch the response has become - R30,945,370.15.

Jodie Chatterton is a dairy farmer in the KZN Midlands and Stellenbosch University graduate with degrees in Commerce and Law.