For the first time Durban municipality revealed the finances behind Moses Mabhida Stadium's operations. And it's all red since 2010 with no prospect for improvement until as late as 2014-2015. Any good news, then? Yes, they're doing much worse in Cape Town...

Last week, for the first time, the municipality, disclosed the stadium’s financial results to The Mercury. These showed the stadium had an income of R71.5 million (€6.4 million) and expenses of R96.8 million (€8.6 million), with a deficit of R25m (€2.2 million) in the financial year that ended on June 30.

This isn't Mabhida's first year in the red and won't be the last as well. Despite numerous claims by the municipality that income is promising and the stadium doesn't generate losses, the situation won't change much until 2014-2015 at the soonest.

„Moses Mabhida Stadium is treated as a business and is on the city’s books as a separate department. As with all start-up businesses it takes time to become profitable and the budgeted losses will continue for the next two to three years. Having said that, the operators of the stadium have, on a consistent basis, improved on the budgeted losses for the past two years”, says Thabo Mofokeng of the eThekwini Municipality.

If anything should work as a consolation for Durban, it may be the situation in Cape Town. There the Cape Town Stadium generates barely R13 million (€1.2 million) of income per year, bringing losses to R60.5 million (€5.4 million) – double the amount from Durban.