JOHANNESBURG, July 5 (Reuters) - More than 200,000 foreign soccer fans are estimated to have so far arrived in South Africa for the continent's first World Cup, and organisers said they expect the number to rise in the tournament's last week.
Foreign arrivals rose 25 percent to just over a million in June compared to the same month last year, Department of Home Affairs figures showed, and soccer officials said they were confident the increase was World Cup-related.
South Africa had slashed an initial estimate of 450,000 foreign visitors after the global downturn and foreign media reports about violent crime caused sluggish sales of World Cup tickets outside the country.
But organisers said on Monday their original expectations may still materialise.
"We are confident that we are going to surpass the number of 450,000 that we already predicted," Rich Mkhondo, spokesman for the local organising committee, said.
Fans from big soccer nations such as England, Germany, Brazil, France and Argentina, as well as the United States, were most represented at the World Cup, a report presented at a sports tourism conference showed.
There were fewer than 10,000 World Cup visitors from the rest of Africa, whose fans bought only 2 percent, or 11,300, of the available tickets, presenters at the conference said.
ECONOMIC BOOST
Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan said last week the number of foreign visitors could come close to 500,000, adding to revenue and the already sizable long-term benefit of a successful tournament. He gave no source for his estimate. [ID:nLDE66112O]
Gordhan said the boost from the World Cup was likely to top the government's estimate of 0.4 percentage points added to economic growth this year.
Mkhondo said organisers expected many other people to arrive during the last week of the tournament, especially fans of the remaining teams -- Germany, Spain, Uruguay and Netherlands.
"Imagine, the Germans will be coming, the Dutch will be coming. Those numbers will actually be going up," he said.
South Africa estimates tourism will add 10 billion rand ($1.35 billion) to the economy, almost 10 times what the hosts spent on marketing in the past four years. Overall, the hosts spent about 40 billion rand on the one-month event.
From wildlife, sandy beaches and dramatic scenery, South Africa has a myriad of attractions and is eager for football visitors to sample the goods in the hopes their enthusiastic tales back home will boost tourism. [ID:nLDE65R25X]
"We were always confident that our country and our people would show the world what a superb destination we offer, and yet the overwhelming positive international coverage has surpassed even our most optimistic expectations," Tourism Minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk said in a statement.
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