By David Owen

Few things in sport make me queasier than when administrators start to bang on about how sport can change the world.

A television programme I happened to watch this week encapsulates why.

BBC Panorama’s More Than Just a Game turned its spotlight on South Africa’s daunting drugs and crime problem by focusing on members of a football team backed by the MyLife Foundation, a Cape Town-based charity.

Among the harrowing life-stories unearthed by reporter Dan McDougall, the one that affected me the most was that of Martin Afrika, a heavily-tattooed striker with doleful brown eyes.

Afrika (pictured), the programme reported, had been “initiated into gangsterism at just 10 years old”, and yet, when he took up football, had turned out to be so good that he played for his country at the 2009 Homeless World Cup.

A heartening tale of redemption through football, or so it appeared.

“They were the best drugs I ever made in my whole entire life,” Afrika said of the goals he had been scoring.

“It changed my life.”

Only it didn’t. Not really. Not yet.

As the programme went on, we met Afrika’s four-year-old son, who was living in what appeared to be dreadful conditions with his mother, a ‘tik’, or crystal meth, addict.

We then learnt that Afrika had been arrested and ordered into rehab after selling a camera he had been given to fund a “drugs binge”.

“Martin Afrika, it seems, will always be a prisoner of his past,” McDougall concludes.

In our final view of the striker, he has become a vision of despair: “You don’t leave the gang,” he says bleakly. “This mark is here forever. If you want this mark out, you have to burn it out. Or you have to cut it out…

“You can’t escape.”

We are informed at the end that he did eventually make it to rehab “after absconding and going on the run for three months”.

Sobering stuff – and a story reinforcing my view that, though sport plainly can make a difference, it is usually in modest ways and over short periods, the way that sometimes even the mere sight of a ball can transport a child for a time from the grimness of her immediate surroundings.

For all the grandiose claims made on sport’s behalf, I think we can rely on it to fulfil only two broader functions.

It acts as a powerful stimulus to the emotions. This can be either good or bad.

It also provides common ground on which people from the most diverse of backgrounds can begin to construct a relationship.

As a global idiom, indeed, only rock music comes remotely close.

‘Ce n’est déjà pas mal’, as the French would say.

But let’s not exaggerate what sport is capable of.

I was also reminded this week of what a tall order South Africa will face to fill its magnificent quiver of new stadia – including Johannesburg’s 94,700-capacity Soccer City, the 11th-largest stadium in the world – once the World Cup is over.

Construction of these fields of dreams makes it all but inevitable, in my view, that South Africa will be a serial bidder for the right to stage international sports events of all kinds in the next decade.

The 2023 Rugby World Cup is one obvious target.

But I can also foresee what might turn out to be a three-sided tussle involving Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town for the honour of being the first African city to host the Olympic Games.

2020 is probably too early – although I would not be in the least surprised to see a South African bid.

But a South African city could be a real contender for the Games of 2024 or 2028.

Let’s just hope that by then the country has made headway towards alleviating its most pressing social problems.

David Owen is a specialist sports journalist who worked for 20 years for the Financial Times in the United States, Canada, France and the UK. He ended his FT career as sports editor after the 2006 World Cup and is now freelancing, including covering last year's Beijing Olympics. An archive of Owen’s material may be found by Twitter users at www.twitter.com/dodo938