LAST WEEK, after letting British Prime Minister Nick Cameron buy lunch, hugging up Prince William and allegedly promising England the votes he broughtto the executive committee of the world football governing body, FIFA vice- and CONCACAF president Austin “Jack” Warner dropped the English bid to host the 2018 World Cup like a hot potato; and the prudent analyst might suspect even that dropped spud wasn’t English; the potato FIFA promptly picked up gives vodka when squeezed.
And it wasn’t just Jack. England got two votes out of 22 and was knocked out in the first ballot, despite having the admitted best technical bid (to the extent bids were assessed; the London Guardian reported only two ExCo members bothered to open the technical bid papers, and then only to send a guideline to the bid committees of their own countries).
The poor English got the most embarrassing snub ever put down in world sport. It was as if FIFA set out to punish them for inventing the game and having the planet’s greatest professional competition.
(The Barclays Premiership is followed more closely than local politics everywhere from Abu Dhabi to Zimbabwe, and you find rivals in Alaska wearing Chelsea and Man U shirts ready to brawl on match day.)
Of course, anyone less trusting could have seen it coming a mile away. It brought to mind the old joke:
A FIFA executive says, “trust me”. (At least, for their sakes, Nick Cameron and the Prince didn’t get the biggest FIFA shaft; that one went straight in the back and through the heart of David Beckham, who was duped into lending his very expensive name to a football academy in Trinidad; or perhaps to another black man on the world stage, President Obama, whose personal phone call might as well have reached Jack Warner’s voicemail, for all the support it got for the United States’ 2022 bid.)
In retrospect, the timing of Andrew Jennings’ Panorama programme and the Sunday Times exposé of FIFA corruption just before the vote was sensible. Vladimir Putin and Roman Abramovich’s Russia got the World Cup; but who trusts Pravda ahead of the London Sunday Observer?
England should respond to its ill treatment by making its Premier League even better. The World Cup happens once every four years; the Premiership brings most of the world’s best players to the ground every week. Add UEFA and the world is covered.
The World Cup generates the excitement it does because of the beauty of the game, not through the efforts of 22 unimaginably wealthy 80-year-old men. It should belong to the world, not to FIFA’s ExCo.
Decisions like last week’s can lead to different futures. In one, the idealist imagines FIFA being held accountable, somehow; in the other, the realist sees the Rolling Stones playing at Jack Warner’s 90th birthday party and the 2026 World Cup going to Trinidad and Tobago.
• BC Pires will be ruled offside, of course.
