SA Tourism defends R1bn Spurs sponsorship, says it can get R88bn back

SA Tourism hit back at criticism of its planned R1 billion sponsorship of English Premier League football club Tottenham Hotspur, saying it is not as tone-deaf as South Africans have accused it of being.

Acting Chief Executive Officer for South African Tourism, Themba Khumalo, said they were expecting to see a good return on that investment – more than 80 times its value – over a three-year period.

SA Tourism-Tottenham Hotspur deal

Khumalo didn’t detail how the return on investment would total R88 billion.

He explained that government had set SA Tourism a goal of achieving 21 million international tourist arrivals by 2030.

Watch: SA Tourism briefing

They were thus exploring sponsorship as an avenue to achieve this, with the scale that is needed.

Aggregated audience

“South African Tourism has chosen to explore a partnership with Tottenham Hotspur FC for a number of reasons, particularly as the United Kingdom is one of South Africa’s key source markets, as per the entity’s Marketing Prioritisation Investment Framework (MPIF).

“Furthermore, sport is one platform that has sustained aggregated audiences, which the entity can tap into to convert fans and spectators into tourists,” he said.

Despite this, the marketing agency for the government’s tourism department came under heavy fire after the news of the sponsorship of the English soccer team leaked.

Many South Africans were flabbergasted by the amount of money allocated to this.

Social media users argued that the money should have been put to better use and invested on local platforms, or to address the country’s more challenging issues.

Khumalo, during a press briefing on Thursday, 2 February 2023, went to great lengths to explain that the money that SA Tourism had allocated to the deal was not actually coming as an additional cost to be derived from the country’s fiscus.

Instead, he said, funds were allocated to them and the typical sort of budget they invested in smaller projects internationally anyway.

“The country has a separate budget to deal with the energy crisis and the potholes. We are not tapping into that,” he said.

Media money

He explained that it was money that was generally used as ‘media money’ and was spent for smaller projects.

The difference now was that it being aggregated and allocated to buy one massive project – Tottenham Hotspur – which he believes will have a greater impact than the smaller projects SA Tourism had in the past.

“The decision was made not based on football but on the concept of aggregated audience. We are accessing the audience of the English Premier League to persuade them to travel to SA and spend their Euros and pounds here,” he said.

Khumalo said that they were still making decisions, and rounding up the calculations when the documentation was “maliciously leaked”.

“The document claims that we were going to allocate a certain amount to the sponsorship. We cannot confirm nor deny that that figure is correct,” he said.