Last night, Fifa and South Africa’s World Cup LOC unveiled the official 2010 World Cup mascot.

It’s called Zakumi…and it freaks me the fuck out.

The marketing geniuses behind the concept are quick to tell us how clever the concept is:

• The first two letters of Zakumi are the country’s initials in Afrikaans - one of South Africa’s 11 official languages.
• “Kumi” means 10 - for the year of the tournament - in many African languages
• ‘zakumi’ can be interpreted as ‘come here’ or ‘come to me’ in some Southern African languages.

That’s all good and well, except that it looks something like the illegitimate lovechild of pokemon and a leopard-giraffe mutant. It also, looks suspiciously like a furry.

For those of you not acquainted with furries and the furry fandom subculture, I’d suggest an educational trip down to godhatesfurries.com, where you will find a completely unbiased, well-balanced factual database of information on these freakshows.

If you’re too lazy, or scared, to check it out for yourself, suffice to say furries are crazy perverts(furverts) who like to dress up like plush toys and fuck each other.

So anyway, my point was that Zakumi looks like a furry.

My initial thought was that this was surely a mistake, an unintentional oversight. But then I started paying closer attention to pictures from the launch show…

See the expression on Danny Jordaan’s face? If that doesn’t scream “kiddy fiddler” then I don’t know what does. But surely he’s not that type of guy? Could he really be a closet furvert?

No, of course not. Think of it from a marketing angle and it became obvious that this picture is designed to send a hidden message to paedophile networks around the dodgy parts of Europe (Germany mostly….oh, and Austria). We need them to bring their wads of Euros to our shores and we will use whatever lures possible to bring them in their droves. As part of the strategy to target this market I expect we will be making heavy use of smiling poverty-stricken children in advertising material promoting the event.