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Australia's former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and FFA Chairman Frank Lowy center left, at Parliament House in Canberra. AP Photo/Rob Griffith
The bid to bring the AFC Asian Cup 2015 to Australia continues with the host of the tournament set to be announced on January 6, 2011 by the Asian Football Confederation (AFC).
Australian football is poised, in the next three months, to discover whether they will be hosts to two prestigious major international football tournaments: the 2022 World Cup and the 2015 AFC Cup. We have never hosted two major FIFA sanctioned football Cup tournaments on Australian soil before, apart from the under-20 FIFA World Cup. However, this time it will be our senior Australian national team that will take centre stage within seven years of each other.
The decisions will be made at a special conference in Zurich for the World Cup on December 2, 2010, and following that, the AFC Executive Committee Congress meeting to be held in Doha, Qatar on January 6, 2011.
Apart from the World Cup bid book, Football Federation Australia (FFA) Chairman Frank Lowy and CEO Ben Buckley handed over Australia’s bid book to AFC President Mohamed Bin Hammam on 29 July, 2010 at AFC House in Kuala Lumpur. The book contained 350 pages of information about how Asia’s largest sporting event would be conducted in Australia.
Australia is the sole bidder for the AFC Asian Cup 2015 and is required to adhere to the formal bidding process as designed by AFC. However, it is most likely a formality now that Australia will win the bid – one down and one to go.
FFA will still be required to deliver its final presentation and respond to subsequent questions from the AFC Executive Committee on 6 January 2011. The AFC Executive Committee will then deliberate and announce the host of AFC Asian Cup 2015.
“Australia has a good track record of hosting successful major events and we believe the AFC Asian Cup 2015 held in Australia would be beneficial to Australia and the entire Asian region,” said FFA CEO Ben Buckley.
“Australia is a sports loving nation and without doubt this tournament would be welcomed by all Australians. Further to that more than 27 per cent of Australia’s overseas-born population is from Asia and 24 per cent of Australia’s longstanding migrants, who arrived before 2002, are Asian-born,” he said.
Australia’s bid to host the AFC Asian Cup 2015 has the full support of the Federal Government as well as the support of the governments of Queensland, New South Wales, Australian Capital Territory and Victoria.
So what does this mean to us the football family? The Australian football community can rejoice in the knowledge that at international level we have done a marvelous job in getting our Australian national team where it is today because of the very hard work done by Frank Lowy, Ben Buckley and the FFA support staff.
On top of that, the Matildas have made Australian history with ground breaking on field achievements – heading to another World Cup as Asian champions.
However, the cost so far has been enormous to the HAL with neglect, and it has taken a battering from the falling attendances; because so much time and effort was put into Australia’s international football ambitions in bringing these two FIFA sanctioned tournaments to Australian shores under mounting pressure from the football family. Was it worth all the effort and pain?
If Frank Lowy and Ben Buckley can pull both events off and the HAL survives until next season then yes, it will be hailed as the greatest achievement Australian football has managed. Because the real winners here will be the Australian domestic league.
This will give the HAL its springboard that Australian football has never had before – an abundance of financial investment in monitory and media attention for 12 years with a television media deal worth hundreds of millions of dollars – also, drawing upon the best young athletes who will want to be part of something that is truly global with the eyes of Asia and the rest of the world focusing in on Australia.
For those who wonder why the Australian government wants to invest large sums of money in Australian football, well its for what it can bring on the international stage for Australia’s business opportunities, and an elite sporting profile, at the very highest levels, which will reflect that Australia is a “can do” nation, and wants to be out there with the very best.
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