SA Tourism boss Themba Khumalo defends R1 billion Tottenham Hotspur sponsorship deal
Pretoria - SA Tourism acting chief executive Themba Khumalo has defended the agency’s drive to target international football fans through a R1 billion sponsorship deal with English Premier League outfit Tottenham Hotspur.
An impassioned Khumalo addressed journalists yesterday, and stressed that the agency had only one mandate – to promote tourism.
He said he appreciated the media’s interest in the tourism sector and for holding leaders accountable, but refused to confirm or deny the reported R1bn deal with the North London club.
“We are under confidentiality, so I can’t go too deep into some of the details there. I can neither confirm nor deny that the numbers that are in the public domain are true.
“There are documents that are flying around. This is the age of social media. People can edit PDFs and can do all kinds of things, so I don’t know what version of the document is out there,” he said.
He defended the decision to go with Tottenham Hotspur as opposed to other bigger teams because those teams already had tourism sponsorships from other countries. “Even if we wanted to, we could not engage them because they already have partners. This was the only team in the top-performing tier that did not have a destination partner.”
Khumalo emphasised that the agency should be judged based on its constitutional mandate. The Tourism Act mandates SA Tourism to market South Africa as a tourist destination both domestically and internationally.
“From a domestic standpoint, it is about getting South Africans to tour within the country, so that we can both support tourism products within the country and keep the money rotating within our economy. Tourism will continue to be a powerhouse of driving economic recovery.
“Let’s get past this, and let’s get back to business. We are going to deal with this issue. We are going to bring it back to the conversation on the economic recovery of a great nation,” he said.
Khumalo said he was passionate about his job because the agency’s activities were aimed at driving billions into the South African economy.
“This particular deal will reach 616 million people. Those are people that watch the game live. I was on a flight and was not watching this particular dynamic until this person said to me (that) he was flying business class and said they can’t afford to watch every premier game live because it is so expensive.
“That gave me the idea that it means that the people who watch the game live are of a certain income bracket. We went and we dug into the numbers and found that the audience that follows the Premiership globally is affluent, can afford to travel and there’s a high propensity to travel within that base.
“If you’ve got 616m as a base and you convert 10%, that is 61.6 million. If you converted 1%, that is still 6 million arrivals. Just 1% conversion of the entire base will give you 6 million arrivals not currently in our consideration set.”
Khumalo said the deal would attract people in high places. “That is why we know that this deal gives you billions in terms of the return on the economy. In terms of the value chain, there are over 35 members of the House of Commons and House of Lords inside that base.
“Being able to access decision-makers in those markets is absolutely critical. Part of what this partnership does is that it gives us access to policymakers in a way that we will not normally be able to access the base.
“Also, there are CEOs of London- listed companies as part of their base. We are able to then to go and pitch to those UK corporations in order to drive business travel into the country.
“When you start unpacking the deal, you’ll start seeing that there’s a lot of underlying benefits of how we actually drive the return on investment on this deal,” he said.
Khumalo suggested it was unfair for the South African deal to be compared with that of Rwanda with another North London football club, Arsenal, worth a reported $10m (R170.3m) a year.
“That deal was a straight media buy. It was buying access to the audience and nothing else.
“When you look at our deal, it has got a whole lot of other benefits. Like I’ve already alluded to, the fact that we are able to do advocacy through this deal.
“We are able to do other more creative things. It is not just a straight media buy. And that is why they paid that amount of money and we are paying slightly more because we have to access an extra bouquet of benefits which is not inside the Rwanda deal.”
He said the Rwandan deal did not have the “on-the-ground impact”, which was different from the South African deal.
“We have been very insistent that in our deal there will be activity on the ground inside South Africa.”
Pretoria News