Prepare to be disappointed, South Africans. One of the world's leading sports economists says you're not going to get rich hosting next year's World Cup.

There'll be no economic bonanza, according to Stefan Szymanski, and if experience matches the last World Cup in Germany, spending by visitors will be much less than the South African government shelled out preparing for the tournament.

"The next World Cup will not be an airplane dropping dollars on South Africa," authors Stefan Szymanski and Simon Kuper write in their new book "Soccernomics."

The caveat comes just ahead of Friday's World Cup draw in South Africa, six months before the long-awaited tournament begins.

Using data analysis, history and psychology, the book punctures dozens of cliches about what it takes to win, and who makes money in soccer _ and in sports in general. The aim is to do for soccer what Bill James in his "Baseball Abstracts," and Michael Lewis in "Moneyball" did for baseball: examine the game from the outside, using social science and academic rigor.

"The problem for South Africa is that they have to spend quite a lot to build stadiums," Szymanski said in a telephone interview from London. "Germany could afford this, and it had stadiums anyway. But South Africa is a nation that can ill afford to fritter away a few billion on white elephants."

Following the 2002 World Cup, for instance, South Korea's K-League had difficulties filling the 10 new stadiums built for the tournament at a cost of more than $2 billion.

The book's argument is that hosting a World Cup or Olympics is an inefficient way to revitalize a city, or enrich a nation _ especially one like South Africa, where a third of the population lives on under $2 a day. It can boost a nation's morale or image, but not much else.

"If you want to regenerate a poor neighborhood, regenerate it," Szymanski and Kuper write. "If you want an Olympic pool and a warm-up track, build them. You could build pools and tracks all across London, and it would still be cheaper than hosting the Olympics."

Szymanski, an economics professor at Cass Business School in London, and Kuper, a sports writer living in Paris, do lots of myth-busting. They even talk of opening a consulting firm for leagues and clubs, promising to improve performance and save money.

"We are not trying to take the magic out of soccer," Szymanski said in the interview. "But we want to understand the patterns, because they are not completely random."

Some of the sometimes surprising findings are:

_The huge transfer fees spent in European club soccer bear little relation to where the club finishes in the league.