Football411.com asks whether the cost of AFCON will outweigh the rewards with the 29th edition of the Africa Cup of Nations ready to kick off...
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Predict result and win big with Soccer6
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'AFCON bleeding hosts,' ran the headline in Thursday's edition of The Times, South Africa's main nationwide daily.
The story was just the latest piece of bad news to come out of the tournament, and told of how host cities - in particular Port Elizabeth and Nelspruit - who were only just beginning to recover from the crippling debt undertaken during the 2010 World Cup, are now being forced to drain money from other more pressing projects to hold the country's latest football festival.
The departments of pubic health, sanitation and even electricity are set to suffer, we are told.
Coming on the back of criticism of the local organising committee for, well, just a general lack of organisation (not to mention concern around ticket sales), it's fair to say that the 29th edition of the Africa Cup of Nations has not exactly slid into the public's consciousness like the tardy Santa's sleigh that we might have hoped for.
Which is why the tournament itself will probably be great.
After all, this is the order of things in the build-up to any major sporting event - the 2010 World Cup and last year's Olympics included.
Predictions of impending doom roll in first, with news of shabby organisation that could derail the entire competition. Without any actual football to report on, the media goes digging for anything worthy of the front page - and in South Africa, as in most countries, that generally means bad news.
This is actually a straightforward exercise, because sporting events by their very nature are, when you strip out the magic of the action and lay down the bare financial facts, completely irrational. Enormous amounts of money - and generally more than initially budgeted - are splurged for international competitions that run for a matter of days or weeks, and at the end of them the greatest reward can not even be measured.
That reward will be known as a number of different things by people of different backgrounds, but South Africans who experienced the World Cup in 2010 might remember it as gees.
The real test of whether the gees takes hold, and leaves the citizens of Port Elizabeth unconcerned about whether they have power cuts so long as they don't happen during the football, begins in earnest on Saturday evening.
So far the hype has been worryingly absent in most communities, even as Bafana Bafana has played a string of warm-up games around South Africa. It probably would have helped if they had scored some goals, and herein lies the acid test, I reckon.
If South Africa suddenly hit form and sweep into the latter stages of the tournament, AFCON could bring back that fuzzy feeling of unity that previous sporting occasions have ignited. If instead they bomb out, South Africans might struggle to maintain interest in many of their African neighbours.
And I mean 'neighbours' in a literal sense as well because immigrants from around the continent reside around South Africa. If Bafana make an early exit then that large immigrant population will probably keep the party going, but South Africans might become bleak that they're the ones footing the bill.
No pressure then, Bafana.
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