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FIFA President Sepp Blatter, left, talks with Football Australia chairman Frank Lowy as they arrive at the opening ceremony for the 58th FIFA congress in Sydney, Thursday, May 29, 2008. AP Photo/Mark Baker
Here is a fearless prediction: England will win the rights to host the 2018 Football World Cup tournament, and Australia will win the hosting rights to the 2022 tournament.
In 2018 it will be Europe’s turn to host the Football World Cup and England’s bid is for all sorts of reasons, financial, geographical and historical, far and away the best and most compelling bid.
That leaves 2022 and the fact that the Football World Cup, after South Africa next year, will have been played in all of FIFA’s regions except one. That exception is Oceania.
Australia moved from the Oceania region to the Asian region of FIFA some year ago. But it’s bid will be promoted (and rightly so) as an Asian/Oceania bid.
In an intriguing article recently in the Sydney Morning Herald, Mike Cockerill, that newspaper’s long-time football writer and Fox Sports commentator, made the point that ‘ever since Joao Havelange ascended the throne in Zurich on 1974, the overriding strategy of FIFA has been to complete the global footprint.
Havelang’a mantra was embraced even more wholeheartedly by his successor, Sepp Blatter, when he took over in 1998.
According to Cockerill, football outspends the two football codes in Oceania by 10 to one in terms of infrastructure. A great deal of this money has come from FIFA through its “hugely successful” GOAL program.
The final boot to drop for FIFA in its Oceania/Asia ambitions, then, is a Football World Cup tournament in Australia, with possibly a round being played in Auckland.
After the renovations made for the 2012 Rugby World Cup, Eden Park in Auckland will be a superb rectangular ground that will conform to the FIFA guidelines by holding 50,000 spectators.
Australia’s main rival for 2022 will be the United States. Right now the USA is on the outer with the world sports officials.
A pointer to the hostility of the international sporting community to the United States can be gauged by its abject failure to get Chicago up for the 2016 Olympics (despite the presence of President Obama). The winner for 2016 was the virtually dysfunctional city of Rio.
With Australia having hosted the best Olympics in 2000 and the best Rugby World Cup tournament in 2007, the nation has an international reputation for running superb international events. The delegates who vote for the Football World Cup tournaments will be aware of all of this.
FIFA’s game plan to spread the football code as thickly as it can into all parts of the globe will also play a part in the final vote.
In the interests of nation-building that will come from hosting a Football World Cup (the biggest sporting event on earth) in Australia, the NRL and the AFL should do what the ARU is doing and support the bid while keeping a watching brief on its own interests.
The main task of the FFA is to present a compelling selling brief to FIFA when it makes its bid next year. This needs to conform to FIFA’s requirements about rival codes and rectangular stadiums. But once the bid is accepted, then the negotiations will take place with FIFA over changes that need to be made.
But the bid has to be won first before this can happen.
And it will happen, once the bid is won. For instance, FIFA requires bans on competing ‘major events’ during the Football World Cup tournament in the host country. But Major League Baseball was allowed to be played in the United States in 1994 when the World Cup was held in that country.
Berlin Olympic Stadium, where the 1936 Olympics were held, which is more round than rectangular, hosted the final of the 2006 Football World Cup held in Germany. So much for the rectangular stadium requirement. In fact, two of the Socceroos matches in the 2006 Football World Cup were played in round stadiums.
Back to Mike Cockerill’s article for a final point. He reckons that FIFA is starting to see a great deal of merit in pushing into its final frontier of Australia and the Oceania nations: “Thanks to the posturing of rival codes, it’s listening more than ever. Threatening the World Cup bid equals threatening FIFA, and FIFA doesn’t take kindly to being threatened.”
So here’s an irony.
The more Andrew Demetriou and David Gallop threaten, the stronger becomes the resolve in the football world to give them something, a Football World Cup in Australia, to shout about.