2010 World Cup And Why It's Bad For South Africa

With the draw set for noon on Friday, the buzz for the 2010 World Cup is growing, especially in South Africa. As the host country, as a result of being the center of the planet's attention for a month next summer, they can almost certainly expect many monies to come their way. In fact, I would guess that they can expect that the next World Cup will be an airplane dropping dollars on South Africa.

"The next World Cup will not be an airplane dropping dollars on South Africa," authors Stefan Szymanski and Simon Kuper write in their new book "Soccernomics."

Oh. Apparently, hosting a World Cup or Olympic Games doesn't really do much to help revitalize a country, so says the authors in "Soccernomics," a book that hopes to do for soccer what "'Moneyball' did for baseball: examine the game from the outside, using social science and academic rigor." Examples of findings from the book:

• Norway is the country that loves soccer the most. Per capita, it's also the best in the world at sports.
• Tournaments such as the World Cup stop thousands from killing themselves — no one can stop watching.
• According to 21 years of data, taking into account national income and population size, Honduras is the most overachieving country in world soccer and Canada is the most underachieving.

Poor Canada. We always knew they weren't good, but now it's been proven by math.