Qatar Vote Shows Lack Of Love For The Game

Friday, 3rd December 2010 at 12:10pm

The decision by the Fifa Executive Committee (ExCo) to award the 2018 finals to Russia and the 2022 Fifa World Cup to the tiny but cash-rich Middle Eastern country of Qatar shows how far down the list of priorities the game of football is to the sport's governing body.

The 2022 tournament, the first to be ever staged in the Middle East, is likely to be played in temperatures of up to and in excess of 50 degrees Celcius in a country that has a population smaller than Manchester and has no experience of dealing with huge influxes of foreign visitors.

Fifa's desire 'to take the game to new frontiers' is all well and good but when it is done at the expense of commonsense and reason, it is little wonder why many football fans and commentators across the globe view the organisation as a joke.

Hosting the 2018 World cup in Russia is a gamble given the need to construct 14 new stadia to be able to accomplish the job. This risk is more prominent when you consider the merits of the joint Spain/Portugal bid and the England bid.

Awarding Qatar the finals is a move that simply beggars belief; Fifa representatives themselves said that the Qatari bid was the one with the highest element of risk but the footballing world will head for the desert in a little under 12 years time.

That huge risk - including the need to build 22 new stadia, Qatar's questionable human rights record and the inhuman temperatures in which to play competitive football - obviously wasn't enough to deter Sepp Blatter's 'old boys club' as the Qatari bid received 13 votes - one more than was needed - as early as the second round despite formidable competition from the USA, Korea and Japan.

This is not an attack on the Qatari bid; it has a number of positives. The fact that 10 of the 12 planned stadiums put forward will be within a 30km radius of each other means easy access for fans and the possibility of seeing multiple games a day.

But even with that in mind you have to feel for the England and Spain/Portugal bid for 2018 and the Australia bid for 2022 - everything in place to host a world cup tomorrow if it was required and in the end this seems to have worked against them.

Maybe they should tear down Wembley, the Camp Nou, Old Trafford and the Santiago Bernebeu next time round; plus you'd have thought the chaos that has been England's transport system these past few days would have been worth a couple of extra votes.

The past few days of schmoozing, clearly the best word to describe proceedings in Zurich, have been conducted in a luxurious five-star hotel but you get the impression that decisions had been made days or weeks before and the excellent efforts from David Beckham, Prince William and David Cameron et al were simply a waste of time.

At least Sepp Blatter and his cronies will have enjoyed being pampered and pandered to these past few days and their egos will certainly have been inflated beyond all recognition after being wined, dined and wooed by some of the leading sporting, world and political figures.

And herein lays the problem. Football's best interests are being looked after by a group of ageing men who seemingly have little or no interest in the game. And why should they? They are a law unto themselves.

How else could Jack Warner, the head of the Concacaf region, get away with buying Fifa World Cup tickets and selling them on the black market TWICE and still have such a controlling influence?

In what other establishment could a man who equated Cristiano Ronaldo's protracted move to Real Madrid from Manchester United to a form of 'modern slavery' and whose idea to improve women's football was to make them wear sexier outfits be the head of an organisation so powerful, especially when said man has numerous skeletons in his own closet, all pointing to financial irregularities in the past.

We are, of course, talking about the Fifa President himself.

The English bid proved to be a complete disaster, winning just two points in the first round of voting as the Fifa ExCo turned on the England team.

Was the English media's intrusion to the goings on at Fifa to blame? On Friday, November 19 Sepp Blatter told the world that the English bid would be judged fairly and that the recent 'cash for votes' expose by The Sunday Times newspaper would not affect the committee's decision.

Encouraging words indeed for the English bid but, according to today's Times, when it came to the crunch, Blatter took the opportunity to remind the committee members about the evils of the press" and recent media coverage" just moments before the vote.

From face value you'd have to say yes but scratching beneath the surface reveals that England's sole voter besides Geoff Thompson was Issa Haytou of Cameroon, one of four men accused of corruption by the BBC's Panorama programme - a man with reason to bear a grudge.

Yet he chose to back the England bid because, echoing the words of Blatter last month, he knew that England could host the World Cup tomorrow" and was the obvious choice.

And indeed England could. It has the stadia, the infrastructure, the support; everything you'd need to host a successful finals and its presentation was declared remarkable" by Blatter.

So what was missing? Maybe it simply boils down to the fact that England just isn't liked that much by high ranking Fifa officials.

Why else has English football been punished - and rightly so - in the past whereas other nations seem to continually get away - literally sometimes - with murder?

Russian football has a problem with racism but evidently racial equality isn't an issue for Fifa or Uefa. Both organisations repeatedly fail to issue correct punishments for racist abuse meted out to players by supporters.

Take the Peter Odemwingie incident. Lokomotiv Moscow fans unveiled a banner upon his departure that had obvious racist undertones but the game's law makers said they didn't have the power to intervene.

Don't have the power to intervene? Well if they don't, who does? But, as I say, this is clearly very low down on Fifa's list of priorities.

Further problems lay with the two-faced nature of the committee. According to Andy Anson, England 2018 chief executive, in The Times individual members promised to vote for the English bid and quite clearly didn't. It is also thought that Jack Warner personally told Prince William that the Concacaf votes were England's before backing Russia.

The saying that there's no honesty among thieves instantly springs to mind.

Am I biased in my assessment? Of course; I would have loved the opportunity of witnessing the World Cup in my home country but this boils down to more than just a case of sour grapes.

If Fifa's desire is to see the World Cup played in new countries then it would seem the chances of England ever hosting the tournament again are slim but don't despair, I hear the 2026 World Cup is heading to St Helena.

They've not got an airport and a population of on 4,000 or so people but the games would be easy to get to once you're there and what a legacy it would leave for a country currently only famous for being the island that Napoleon Bonaparte was exiled on.

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