World Cup centrepiece Soccer City celebrates snappy, safe build

Oct 21, 2009, 15:02 GMT

Soweto, Johannesburg - Soccer City, the centrepiece stadium of next year's World Cup in South Africa, celebrated more than one million man hours of work without serious injury Wednesday with a roof wetting ceremony that was abetted by a shower of rain.

The 89,000-seat stadium, located on the edge of Soweto township outside Johannesburg, home of South African soccer, will host the opening game and final of the World Cup, which being held for the first time in Africa next year.

Built in the shape of a calabash, a gourd that doubles up as a cooking pot in Africa, and covered in red and brown tiles that match the earth, the stadium is 95-per-cent complete.

At the height of construction, some 3,700 workers were engaged in building Africa's biggest stadium.

They, and their co-workers at the nine other World Cup stadiums, have been promised a pair of tickets each for the soccer extravaganza, but some fear they will be forgotten as their contracts come to an end.

On Wednesday, a trade union member representing the workers urged FIFA president Joseph Blatter to honour his promise.

'It's going to be chaos,' Soccer City manager Mike Moody warned.

Soccer City has been built far quicker than the Bird's Nest stadium in Beijing, which hosted last year's Olympics, and the new Wembley Stadium in London - a source of some pride locally.

The new Wembley Stadium was built in 58 months, while Soccer City has been under construction for less than three years, having started in early 2007.

In Beijing, several workers had died building the Bird's Nest, while Soccer City has experienced no serious injury. There have been a few fatalities at other 2010 stadiums, however.

South Africa has built five new stadiums and upgraded five others in nine host cities for the World Cup. Soccer City was the biggest of the upgrades, costing 3.4 billion rand (466 million dollars). It is also the only one of the 10 stadiums that was designed by South African, rather than German architects, according to Moody.

While the stadium's full capacity is 94,000 seats, 5,000 seats will be taken out for the World Cup, in line with world football body FIFA guidelines.