Indeed the site has also tried to bring fans as close as possible to the team as it could, going behind the scenes with the players coaches and back room staff in a bid to give fans a closer look into the operations of the team.

With intention of further developing the site in order to bring fans even closer to the team, that Chiefs sent KC.COM journalist Yusuf Muhammad to a two day FIFA 2010 World Cup Media workshop, which was held at the Cape Town international Convention Centre on Tuesday and Wednesday, in Cape Town kaizerchiefs.com, were afforded the opportunity to throw some question at Charles-Henry Contamine the head of FIFA new media. Contamine a French national has over the last couple of years been responsible for the success of the highly popular FIFA.COM and soon to be merged with the former FIFAWORRLDCUP.COM websites.

YM: In your presentation to the media you spoke of the importance of a website to a your organization, at club level how important would you rate a web site to the day to day operations of a club team?

CHM: Very important is what I would say especially to a club no matter where in the world it may be, if you look at a team like Kaizer Chiefs they have expatriate fans or South Africans living outside of the country. These fans want to be kept up to date with the latest news at their team, because they can not easily access South African Football information else where easily they rely heavily on the club site to keep them updated.

A club website is probably the most important communication device they can possess, as it is the fastest and simplest medium of keeping their fans informed and get various messages relating to other issues such as ticket sales and fixtures out to the public.

YM: It was mentioned earlier that FIFA.COM and FIFAWORLDCUP.COM will be merged into one site, prior to the 2002 FIFA World Cup in Korea-Japan. The tournament LOC ran their own site like at the FIFA World Cup France 98, why was this done?

CHM: If we go to France 98 the LOC website which incidentally I ran at the time had 50 times more traffic than the FIFA Website around that particular website, so a decision was taken to develop one site. A site where you could retrieve all kinds of information around the FIFA World Cup, whether it be on ticketing or match information so we created a destination site for the FIFA World Cup with FIFAWORLDCUP.COM. In the New Year FIFA.COM and FIFAWORLDCUP.COM will operate as one site as we want to bring them under one roof so to speak.

YM: In your time working with the FIFA websites when would you say that most fans would access your websites during the month long FIFA World Cup tournament?

CHM: In the last two FIFA World Cup’s I noticed that at the conclusion of the group stage of matches we have a high amount of traffic on the FIFAWORLDCUP.COM site, at the recent 2006 FIFA World Cup in Germany we had 249 million hits right at the conclusion of the group stages.

YM: For the next FIFA World Cup to be staged in South Africa are there any plans to improve the coverage of the FIFA World Cup on your website, with some technological advances to the site?

CHM: We have to improve FIFA World Cup by FIFA World Cup, we will look at improving our imagery on the site and making it more interactive with our site we do have to take one thing into consideration. That is that we cannot have a site that is at the cutting edge of technology for the simple reason that we have a lot of people who access our site from countries where perhaps the internet connection is different to places that have a more developed communication systems. We need to take these people into consideration when we decide to make additions to our website, we cater for a massive global audience and we must keep this fact in front of us at all times.

YM: When your site re-launches in 2007 will you be launching it in any more languages than those that the website currently is available in?

CHM: Yes we will be expanding that in time, some of the languages that we have looked at translating the site into are Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Russian, Portuguese and Arabic which we hope to add to English, French, Spanish and German the languages that the site is presently available in. These are just some of the additional languages we are looking at adding to FIFA.COM in time it could be many more.