Berlin - Many observers felt South Africa should have hosted the 2006 World Cup, but with stadiums packed to capacity and millions of fans watching matches on big screens, Germany has more than proved it deserved the right.
After a month of sun-kissed games played to one full house after another, it is hard to recall that Germany was awarded the right to host the tournament in a storm of controversy.
The crucial vote in July 2000 was overshadowed by a voting scandal.
Oceania delegate Charles Dempsey cited "intolerable pressure" for his decision to abstain in the final round of voting in Zurich, giving Germany a 12-11 victory over South Africa.
Dempsey had been expected to vote for the African bid. In the event of a 12-12 tie, Fifa President Sepp Blatter would have made the final decision and he had heavily favoured holding the World Cup in Africa for the first time.
Instead, the magnetic personality of Franz Beckenbauer swung the vote in Germany's favour, which as West Germany had already hosted the event in 1974.
Beckenbauer, a World Cup winner as a player and coach, argued that Germany would prove itself to be a unified country at ease with itself, capped by the staging of the final in the once-divided city of Berlin.
Germany has emphatically delivered on that promise.
Fans biggest winners
"It will be difficult to organise a better World Cup than Germany has done," said Lennart Johansson, the Swede who heads European football body Uefa and is also a Fifa vice-president.
Beckenbauer himself has hailed the fan areas set up to show matches on big screens as the big success of the tournament.
"The big winner of the World Cup has been the fan. The organised Fan Miles and also the impromptu ones have exceeded all expectations," he said.
The abiding image of the World Cup may well be the scenes at Berlin's Fan Mile, which was extended to accommodate 900 000 people when the host nation played.
The progress of Jurgen Klinsmann's young team to the semi-finals undoubtedly added to the happy atmosphere.
The organisation of the month-long, 64-match event was not completely trouble-free.
Germany avoided any of the last-minute scramble of the 2004 Athens Olympics, but a spanner was thrown in the works in January when a German consumer watchdog group criticised the safety of some of the stadiums.
Wolfgang Niersbach, Beckenbauer's number two in the organisational structure, described the claims by the Stiftung Warentest as "ridiculous", but they gained worldwide media coverage.
Limited modifications were made to a handful of stadiums, including the venue for the final, the Olympic Stadium in Berlin, although the organisers insisted they were unrelated to the watchdog's findings.
Eleven of the 12 World Cup stadiums will go straight back into action when the German Bundesliga season starts in August, while efforts are under way to create a new club to use the Zentralstadion in the eastern city of Leipzig.
Fears of hooliganism at the tournament proved largely unfounded, with scuffles involving German, English and Polish fans contained relatively quickly by riot police.
And the International Organisation for Migration said the predicted rise in human trafficking linked to force prostitution during the tournament failed to materialise.
Blatter has given his seal of approval, praising a "wonderful atmosphere".
South Africa, which was finally awarded the right to host the 2010 World Cup, has a tough act to follow.
