It was entirely predictable that Sepp Blatter’s comments on the 2022 World Cup in Qatar being played in January raised a howl of protest.
Not only does it seem extraordinary that after the game is over, the rules of the game are changed, but the near-revolution this would cause to the European game is incalculable.
But what has been missed in all this is that Blatter, the most consummate of sports politicians –
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The imminent arrival of Wembley chairman David Bernstein in the same post at the English Football Association (FA) has sent me scurrying to the FA’s accounts.
Has David Beckham done something that no other footballer has ever managed?
I do not mean his setting the pace among male fashion models, or the fact that he is now tutoring the next generation of Beckhams to be fashion models as well.
His eight year old son Romeo is now 26th in GQ magazine’s top 50 best-dressed men in Britain list, not that far behind David, who is 16th.
So we’ve got Rodney – Marsh, of course, who else? – in the nightclub – Tramps, of course, where else? – with George – Best, of course, who else? – and Michael – Caine, of course, who else?
And Caine’s conversation gets around to all the great things Best – now playing with Marsh at Fulham – did at Old Trafford.
The problem arrives when Caine leans across the table and,
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It did not take long for the board of the Football Association to choose David Bernstein as the new chairman. The whole thing, I am told, took a bare five minutes. He was nominated, all hands went up and on to the next business.
However, sometime after this decision, there was a report by Andy Anson on England’s disastrous World Cup bid for 2018. Here something rather curious happened.
Before the meeting there had been much anticipation of what Anson,
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Sam Allardyce as the saviour of football is a difficult concept to accept. But judging from the media reaction to his sacking, it would seem the new owners of Blackburn have committed a crime that would be beyond Herod.
They have not only sacked a manager, bad enough, but done it after consulting an agent, Jerome Anderson, and a firm based in Switzerland. To make it worse, the owners themselves are foreign, an Indian group whose business is poultry,
The World Cup is gone. English football now needs some clear thinking about its future relations with the international game.
The disappointment of the Zurich vote that saw the 2018 World Cup awarded instead to Russia brought with it talk of breaking away from FIFA.
Such thoughts, moreover, were not confined to those whom one might easily write off as “extremists” in this context.
So FIFA is corrupt, full of Executive members who look you in the eye and lie, and England is taking its ball home.
Should such a statement be put to the British public today, I am quite certain it would receive unanimous support. Even before the Zurich debacle, FIFA, and in particular President Sepp Blatter, would have struggled to win a popularity contest in the mother land of football. But I have rarely seen a country and its media so united in its condemnation of the organisation.
The uninformed, largely bigoted vitriol being aimed at Qatar after they were awarded the World Cup 2022 would it appear, be for no other reason than they had a successful bid.
I should declare in advance that I am a “fan” of many of the Gulf nations having worked in and visited a number of them, including Qatar.
Legacy is important to FIFA, something we have largely ignored in England when reacting to the allocation of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups.
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I said last month that England had a snowball’s chance in hell of winning the 2018 World Cup finals, but it gives me no satisfaction to have been proved right.
I thought Russia winning the 2018 finals was a fait accompli. And Qatar getting the 2022 finals will be devastating for the US domestic game. FIFA have clearly taken a decision to take their finals further afield.
England had the best presentation –
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In one corner of the room in one of Switzerland’s plushest hotels, the unmistakable figure of Chuck Blazer, FIFA’s Tweeting Executive Committee member, holds court.
On the other side of a large Christmas tree, a Boys’ Own triumvirate of David Beckham, Gary Lineker and Fabio Capello cluster around a small coffee table.
Nearby, English Premier League boss Richard Scudamore has been doing his bit, engaging the Asian Football Confederation chairman and Qatari ExCo member Mohamed Bin Hammam in earnest conversation for quite some time.
The destination of the 2018 World Cup finals is about to be revealed in Zurich, and for my money that destination will be Spain-Portugal.
But however it turns out, there is no doubt in my mind where the 2022 finals are heading – the United States.
The US withdrew their bid for the 2018 World Cup because, according to the chairman of their bid committee, Sunil Gulati, they had no chance of winning it and they want to concentrate on bidding for the World Cup after that.
The BBC’s Panorama programme told us nothing new about the 2018-22 World Cup campaign.
But it underlined the need for a changing of the guard in FIFA’s upper echelons.
World football’s governing body plainly has no intention of further investigating the nature of links between football officials and the ISMM/ISL sports marketing organisation which collapsed nearly a decade ago.
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Once the white smoke from FIFA’s conclave of cardinals has dissipated into the clear alpine air on Thursday (December 2), the way will be clear for an almighty inquest into the way English football is run.
The disappointing nature of the national team’s 2010 World Cup campaign in South Africa has ensured this inquest will happen whether or not England’s bid to stage world football’s flagship tournament in 2018 succeeds.
But,
Should England not win the 2018 World Cup, and that must be considered a possibility, then I suggest the starting point for the post-mortem should be a thin orange and blue FIFA booklet called the Committees Directory 2110. This lists the people who sit on the various FIFA committees.
These committees are the powerhouse of the organisation. They range from World Cup organisation, to referee administration, the technical development of the game, player status,