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Last time I wrote on The Roar about Australia’s World Cup bid, I honestly thought things couldn’t get much worse for bid leader Ben Buckley. How wrong I was. At a time when Australia was desperately trying to get their bid back on song, Mohamed Bin Hammam stood up and embarrassed Football Federation Australia in front of a myriad of AFC and FIFA representatives.
“I want to give my sympathy on behalf of the AFC that we are going to recognize and support Europe and their desire to host the 2018 tournament,” Bin Hammam told the AFC congress in early June.
That proclamation caught Australia’s World Cup bid team entirely by surprise.
Fortunately for Ben Buckley, that kind of awkward announcement only lasts a news cycle or two. The same can’t be said about the latest fiasco.
In a number of articles this week Nick McKenzie and Richard Baker highlighted “gifts” given to FIFA executive members, large consultant fees and federal aid agency involvement as potentially scandalous behaviour from the Australian World Cup bid.
Fairfax’s investigation has already been running prominently on their various websites for a few days now and, with FIFA running it’s own investigation in the Australian bid, it’s safe to say this “scandal” has legs.
Contrary to what you may have read on The Roar this week, Qatar’s bid has been struggling to find much traction amongst the FIFA executive members.
Couple that with the latest set of problems to bemoan Australia’s bid and the US delegation should be feeling pretty hopeful right about now.
Yet, all is not lost for Australia.
First of all, this isn’t the first World Cup bid to be “investigated” by FIFA in recent months. FIFA’s ethics committee has already looked at two other bids involved in the bidding process.
One of those was England’s following Lord Triesman’s ill-advised, and ultimately fatal, comments about the Spain/Portugal and Russian bids.
The other incident FIFA looked at is still so shrouded in secrecy that I’m not even sure I’m permitted to write about it.
Either way, while those two bids have been hurt, they are still alive.
Unless FIFA comes back with something substantial against FFA, an outcome I still see as being highly unlikely, Australians need not be too concerned.
However, personally I’m left troubled by the reaction from some members of the Australian football community. Lets be clear, accusations regarding the behaviour of Australia’s World Cup bid team should not be seen as an attack on Australian football.
When AU$45 million of taxpayer money is being spent, transparency is necessary. The Fairfax investigation, whether it’s concerns are proved valid or not, has provided that.
For me the question we still need to answer, and the real reason why transparency in such bids is important, is what price are we willing to pay for a successful World Cup? (And I’m not talking about pearl necklaces)
When I posed that question last year, the response was mixed. I wonder if people still feel the same.
Either way, Fairfax did us a favour by literally spelling out the answer and it’s AU$11.37 million for two consultants, Fedor Radmann and Peter Hargitay.
I’m wondering exactly what is it that Radmann and Hargitay are doing that’s worth so much money.
In another Fairfax article written days before their investigation into Australia’s World Cup bid, Dan Silkstone quoted Hargitay, who was introduced to Lowy by Les Murray, as saying that AFC President Mohamed Bin Hammam “is my brother and I am his’.
Yet if Australia is paying Hargitay millions of dollars because of his close connections with Bin Hammam, then why did the AFC President so unequivocally embarrass FFA and Australia’s bid in Johannesburg three weeks ago?
How come Bin Hammam’s, now rather rich, “brother” didn’t know in advance and tell Frank Lowy and Ben Buckley?
At the moment the only silver lining around this latest cloud is half of the aforementioned AU$11.37 million figure will only be paid out if Australia wins the rights to host the 2022 World Cup.
Unfortunately it’s an “if” which just keeps getting bloody bigger.
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