Paul Lewis: Best guess or fairy story

Eden Park's upgrade formed part of the beat-up. Photo / Bradley Ambrose

There's a fine old journalistic tradition called a beat-up. It's a bit like seeing a headline "High ranking politician found in women's clothing" and then you turn to page 6 only to discover that it was Helen Clark.

It's making a mountain out of a molehill, yes, but when taken to extremes, it results in newspapers like Britain's recently deceased and lamented (by me, anyway ... ) Sunday Sport and its daily stablemate. Lamented not because it/they were good newspapers - but because they took the beat-up to preposterous, comic and eventually fatal lengths.

They produced gems like: 'Donkey robs bank'; 'Bagpipes strangled grandma'; 'B52 bomber found on Moon'; and a personal favourite - 'Lovesick gardener marries lettuce'; followed a week later by the sad corollary: 'Greenfly ate my wife'.

Perhaps the strangest SS headline was: 'Aliens turned our son into a fish finger'.

Quite why anyone would read this gubbins is beyond me. As is the answer to the question: did anyone believe it? The SS dealt a bit in soft core female nudity, which might explain its 250,000 readers at its height, but there's no doubt it took the beat-up to cosmic levels.

News this week that, gasp, the Rugby World Cup would be costing New Zealand lots of money was a classic beat-up. As with all beat-ups, as opposed to the SS over-the-top kind, it has a bit of a basis in validity.

The government and/or the good folk tied up with RWC 2011 made the mistake of turning to economists to justify the expense. Now, I can tell you, after another life in public relations, such estimates are floated often to explain why governments and companies put so much money into such events.

The problem with econometric studies and economists' estimates is that they are a stab in the dark. No one can tell for sure how much money will accrue from a World Cup or an Olympics. It's a guess at best; at worst, a fairy story.

There are too many intangibles; too many unknowns; too many vagaries for anyone to say precisely what value will arise from RWC 2011. But vague estimates of income of $700 million have holes big enough to drive a newspaper delivery truck through.

Which is what happened. The shock-horror revelation that the Cup would have a $500m deficit was accompanied by little breakout boxes showing that football World Cups, the 2003 Rugby World Cup and the 2000 Olympics all made a great deal less than it was claimed they would.

Fair enough, too. Worst of the lot was Sydney's Olympics which promised $8.7 billion in revenue but which lost nearly $6m. Rather a large differential.

How anyone can tot all this stuff up is, again, beyond me and probably anyone else. But it's not an error, per se. What is an error is basing a judgement on a guess. So the Cup people made an economic judgement on a guess and the NZ Herald did the same thing.

They thundered that $1.2 billion was being spent and only $700m recouped - and held that up against predictions of lesser deficits. They ran opinion from other economists that the revenue derived would be far less than $700m.

The problem was that, in assessing the expenditure for the World Cup, they included things that would have happened anyway but which were corralled into a box called 'World Cup costs'. That included the redevelopment of Eden Park; the new Dunedin stadium and council costs for doing up Okara Park and many other stadiums so they were up to RWC standard.

Eden Park would have had to be redeveloped anyway at some stage in the near future. The old girl's petticoats were starting to show through frayed skirts.

Carisbrook is an outdated, cold, dilapidated venue; being replaced anyway. Those about to squawk about the waterfront stadium proposal should remember how much more expensive it was to build than Eden Park.

If you subtract the costs of Eden Park and Dunedin alone, that's close to $250m right there. Plus $150m has to be sent off to the IRB. Feeling a little better about that $500m deficit? That's even before you go round the country adding up what various councils are spending on upgrading grounds - which surely would have happened over time anyway.

Rugby, like it or not, is the national game and Northland, for example, was about as likely to let Okara Park fall into disuse as John Key was likely to have turned up to the Royal Wedding wearing an 'I hate Kate' T-shirt.

If you need further convincing about beat-ups, take a look at the Herald on Sunday of May 2, 2010. A piece by Matt Nippert showed that ... gasp ... the economic benefits of hosting a RWC had been overstated.

One expert dismissed the claim that 238 countries tuned in to watch the last tournament in France. Considering the UN recognised only 192 nations in the world, Deloitte (who did the study for the IRB) had apparently invented over 40 new countries, all of which seemed to be rugby fanatics.

A year on, all that has changed is the updating of the maths and a troll around the councils' and government spending in a way that almost makes it seem like they were doing something wrong.

No one ever hosts a World Cup or an Olympics or Commonwealth Games for financial gain, unless by creative accounting. The real reasons are much more connected to the human psyche: pride, showing off, boosting confidence, patriotism.

We will likely never host another; too expensive. We will never host the Commonwealth Games again, it seems; nor the Olympics, unless we strike Arabian Gulf-size oil deposits.

So let's just enjoy the World Cup rather than chasing our tails and vague numbers from the magical mystery of mathematics. Let's enjoy the benefits it is bringing to stadiums around the country that support the national game.

Or ... we could all go and marry a lettuce.