MALABO - Staging a World Cup or European championship is a huge undertaking where host nations are expected to build state-of-the-art stadiums and provide hotels and transport for hundreds of thousands of visitors.

Preparations for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa and this year's European Championship in Poland and Ukraine were surrounded by doubts over whether the host nations could cope with the influx of visitors.

At the Africa Cup of Nations, organisers have found a way of making things much easier for themselves: they ignore the fans altogether. As in previous editions of the tournament, co-hosts Gabon and Equatorial Guinea have been expected to provide facilities only for the 16 participating teams and their officials. These boil down to four stadiums, a similar number of training grounds, a handful of hotels and charter flights to ferry the teams around.

In Malabo, the capital of Equatorial Guinea where Group B was played, accommodation for teams and officials has varied enormously.

Ivory Coast were placed in a luxury hotel with its own private beach and golf course, reached by a fully-lit, six-lane highway, while Sudan were in a kitsch, three-star establishment with low ceilings and fake chandeliers, situated next to a noisy roundabout.

The four teams shared two training grounds, one of them the old national stadium. It was a similar story elsewhere.

Local organisers chartered planes from Royal Air Maroc to transport teams and Confederation of African Football (CAF) officials between the venues of Malabo, Bata, Libreville and Franceville.

The Boeing 737 aircraft sometimes carried only a handful of people. Everyone else was left to infrequent scheduled flights, which in the case of the Malabo to Libreville route were less frequent than daily with some departing at 3am.

CAF's policy has in the past 15 years allowed it to take the Nations Cup to countries such as Burkina Faso, Mali, Ghana and Angola, which would not be able to cope with large numbers of visiting fans.

The downside is that, unless the host nation is playing, most matches are played in front of rows of empty seats, one of the most dispiriting sights in sport.

World Cup quarterfinalists Ghana found themselves playing Guinea before only 4000 fans in Franceville, even fewer saw Ivory Coast beat Angola in Malabo and only a few hundred watched the Zambia-Sudan quarter-final in Bata.

The only visiting fans at the Nations Cup tend to be organised groups who are heavily subsidised by the government or federation of their country. Varying from 50 fans for Burkina Faso to around 600 from oil-rich Angola, these supporters' clubs include bands and are capable of bringing the emptiest of stadiums to life.

For independent fans, however, it is a near-hopeless task. Low-cost airlines are a rarity in Africa and connections are often slow, complicated and painfully expensive. In any case, there is often no accommodation.

To add insult to injury, local fans are priced out of the games. The cheapest tickets for matches in Equatorial Guinea were equivalent to a week's income for most people.