SA Tourism (SAT) acting CEO Themba Khumalo said thanks, not sorry, yesterday when he appeared before parliament’s portfolio committee on tourism.
He apologized for his outburst last week over the controversy surrounding his R900 million sponsorship of English football club Tottenham Hotspur – but later complained he had done so out of frustration and anger after being targeted on social media.
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The whining was in evidence shortly after, while presenting to the committee a slippery PowerPoint presentation of the proposed deal, Khumalo said that if this agreement is canceled, it will send a message that SA Tourism “must advise all partners and potential partners we can not do big things “.
Cancel this and you will make us look bad. Boo, hoo… That’s right, the deal has made you look bad, Mr. Khumalo. It has now emerged that the “Visit South Africa” sleeve logo will only appear on the full Spurs kit in the second year of the three-year deal. In the first year it will only be in the training jersey.
So how does SAT believe that, in this first year, it will increase the number of people visiting South Africa by 8%, or more than 1.1 million visitors?
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Not only that, elsewhere in the presentation, the club specified that the first year’s sleeve logo does not include “training clothes used for UEFA competitions, Women’s Teams, Academy Teams, and any training used in stores.”
Although Spurs – with a claimed global fan base of 616 million – are undoubtedly the main attraction, we wonder how many of those fans will be watching their training sessions?
And the agreement is hardly generous in sharing access to fans, limiting SAT to only two e-mail offers directly to the club’s database and only two inclusions in the club’s monthly digital newsletter.
This certainly doesn’t look like the Deal of the Century.
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