One of my favourite memories is taking a road trip with friends to watch four games of the FIFA World Cup in 2010. We started in Cape Town, drove to Johannesburg to watch David Villas score two goals for Spain against Honduras, and on the way back stopped in Bloemfontein to watch South Africa’s Bafana Bafana beat a hapless France. The World Cup was a moment that brought South Africans together as only sport can do. Indeed, as Nelson Mandela said, sport ‘has the power to unite people in a way that little else does’. I experienced it very vividly that day in the City of Roses.

Throughout the road trip, though, I was thinking of a question that a visiting geography professor – whose name I, sadly, forget – had asked at a University of Cape Town seminar only a few months earlier: How do you win a World Cup?