Mark Gevisser wrote about South African identity in both the build up to the World Cup  Cup http://www.timeslive.co.za/sundaytimes/article439527.ece/I-want-to-imagine-the-SA-of-my-dreams  as well as after the final whistle had been blown:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2010/jul/10/south-africa-unites-over-football . See his latest take  on what it means to be a South African in late 2010:  http://www.arttimes.co.za/news_read.php?news_id=2683 

It will take three to five years to see the economic benefits of the World Cup, a Human Sciences Research Council academic says. However, it was too early to tell how great these benefits would be, said Dr Udesh Pillay, head of research on service delivery at the HSRC. He added that the economic benefits [...]

The World Cup final between Spain and the Netherlands was the most-watched football game in US television history, drawing 24.3 million viewers, said Nielsen. According to a report on the IoL site, the final on the ABC network and Spanish-language Univision outdrew the June 26 US-Ghana match, which attracted 19.4 million viewers, and the 18.1 [...]

John Carlin, the author of ’Playing the Enemy’, says all those stories, promoted by FIFA, among others, about the World Cup being the 1995 rugby World Cup all over again, about healing racial wounds, uniting the fractured nation and so forth, were off the mark. ’It was much, much better than that. What we saw [...]