- Video
-
Club Roar
Captured a great grassroots sporting moment? We want to see it!Content Collections
The Roar Community
- Join
- Login
There was a diverting little debate in the Fairfax press yesterday debating the chances Australia had of winning the 2018 hosting rights for the FIFA World Cup. Michael Cockerill said yes we could; Andrew Stevenson (who’s he?) said no we couldn’t.
Read the story. I’d be interested to hear your own views. I didn’t find either argument particularly convincing.
For me, the key issue for Australia even getting anywhere with the bid is yet to be resolved.
We have no indication yet of what the Chinese are preparing to do, and if the Chinese throw their hats into the ring the complexion of the Australian bid for the World Cup could change completely.
There’s been a lot of trumpeting in some quarters that Mohamed Bin Hammam, the president of the Asian Football Confederation and the Mr Big of Qatari football, is right behind Australia’s bid.
That is debatable.
What Hammam has said publicly is this: “I support an Asian bid, and that is going to be much easier for me and my colleagues on the committee if only one bid comes from Asia, that would be an advantage.”
He has not ruled out another bid coming from elsewhere in Asia; rather expressed his desire that there only be one.
Back in 2007, when he was in Sydney for the AFC Awards, he said: “As a confederation, we have to go in with one bid, we can’t have two or three … we just couldn’t afford that. We would have to come to a stage where we have to decide which one has the best chance and advise the other bidders to withdraw for the benefit of the other.
“If we have one bid, all Asia can go and fight for that candidate but if there are two or more bids it will be very difficult.”
Chinese football itself might be in all sorts of trouble but there are billions of reasons why hosting a World Cup on Chinese soil will be attractive for FIFA, never the most altruistic organisation. The
recent Beijing Olympics was a bonanza for sponsors, all keen to tap into the commercial bounty of the Far East; the 2012 London Olympics is having a far more difficult time of it finding the money it needs
to make the whole shebang a profitable enterprise.
I wrote about the issue specifically in one of my blogs for SBS.
The team behind the Australia 2018 bid have made a big deal about the numbers of TV viewers in the Far East; that is only to China’s advantage, not ours. Fresh from hosting the Olympics, an Asian Cup and
the Women’s World Cup in the past decade, China also has a distinct advantage from the start in that it already has the required number of stadia in the required number of cities already built and operational.
The hugely influential Zhang Jilong is vice-president of the AFC’s executive committee; Australia doesn’t even have a full member on the committee (Moya Dodd is a “co-opted member”).
Jilong also happened to be director of the Sports Department of the Beijing Organising Committee for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad (BOCOG). He was recently awarded a FIFA Order of Merit by Blatter himself before Beijing 2008.
Like Lowy, he is on FIFA’s Organising Committee for the World Cup.
What mitigates against China, of course, is the poor state of Chinese football, both the national team and the Chinese Super League, and Australia will be hoping that counts for something.
But FIFA and the AFC might just as likely decide that hosting a World Cup is the heartstarter Chinese football needs. If the “future is Asia”, as the AFC likes to tell us, then a healthy, vibrant and strong Chinese football market is a prerequisite.
So let’s get some perspective and not jump the gun.
The biggest challenge to the success of the bid might not be England, Franz Beckenbauer and Michel Platini after all but some AFC “friends” closer to home.
Are you the ultimate team manager? Pick your own superstar team and go head to head with other football fans for glory and cash prizes on Draftstars. Imagine what you could be buying instead. Set a deposit limit.