Perhaps my initial reaction to the 2010 logo was a bit harsh. Cherryflava – who, unfortunately, is still in the process of selling his soul to Chris Bangle – has a nifty link to an archive of previous World Cup logos, and by those standards, ours is positively superlative. So what if it bears an unhealthy resemblance to the Intel emblem – at least it doesn’t leave the viewer with an “eyes burning out” sensation in the manner of Mexico ‘70.

The main graphic on the 2010 logo is actually quite attractive. The only real problems are the ugly blue border and the font. The top-right corner in particular is an aesthetic disaster area: the big blue swoosh can’t decide whether or not it’s part of the African continent, and the World Cup badge in the corner breaks up the symmetry of the whole image. I bet myself that I could make a better-looking version of the logo in five minutes of Paint Shop Pro, and the result can be found here. Well, I certainly think it looks better.

But the debate over the aesthetics of the logo, entertaining as it is, also obscures a bunch of deeper issues. It’s easy to detect an air of desperation in Danny Jordaan’s assertions that we’re “ahead of Germany” because, at this stage in their preparations, the Germans didn’t even have a logo. Fine, they didn’t, but what they did have was a high-speed rail network linking all their major cities. Which one of those obstacles sounds to you like it would be the easiest to overcome? And since we’re asking difficult questions, what are we going to do with a bunch of 60,000-80,000 capacity stadiums when the World Cup is over, given that normal PSL games (not counting Chiefs vs. Pirates) typically struggle to draw a crowd of more than 10,000? Basically, we have lot of problems to worry about that are deeper and more pressing than any logo.