JerusalemMan
Chris Perry
It isn't, there's already protests about it.
It's faintly ludicrous on the face of it, tbh - I'm involved in government-wide planning, and I would be unemployed in a week if I ever let a proposal to fund a Premier League team get to Cabinet.
That the South African government signed off on this while their country is roiled by power cuts, widespread crime and poverty is on the face of it pretty stark, especially given that this money would have done far more good bring invested into the South African game.
It's not even like they're a pseudo-dictatorship like Rwanda - they're a functional democracy, there are supposed to be checks on this sort of thing.
https://ewn.co.za/0001/01/01/sa-tourism-board-conditionally-approves-tottenham-hotspur-deal
"The money that is invested in tourism is not the same money for energy or potholes, there are other departments for that. Our legislative mandate is about persuading international travelers to spend their money in the country,” Khumalo explained.
Khumalo said before the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, tourism was contributing 6.4% to the country’s gross domestic product (GDP). This has since dropped to 3.2%. He said SAT was not asking for “new money” to go into the deal, but rather that SAT would be aggregating the money that would go into their smaller projects to the deal. "If you take 2017 to 2019, we spent just under R1.2 billion in terms of media investment on foreign soil. So that money has been spent in international marketing in any event. For the last 20 years, money has been spent on foreign soil to persuade foreign nationals to travel into South Africa."