Premier League Nonsense

A bunch of stiff necked suits will be running round England for the next few days poking their noses into every nook and cranny of England’s latest World Cup bid ahead of FIFA’s announcement in December of where the 2018 World Cup will be held.

In footballing terms it’s a no brainer. Football and logic dictates England will get to host the World Cup for the first time since 1966. Everything, but everything is in place to make the fiesta the best ever. The stadiums are in place, there is infrastructure, and there are hotels. The English are second to none when it comes to sports marketing.

There will be none of this last minute panic like we saw in South Africa as orgainsers rush to get stadiums finished.

We have a football public that leads the world in face painting, we boast the most popular league in the world with the biggest clubs in the world. We have David Beckham, Wayne Rooney and, um, Peter Crouch.

We have Wembley Stadium, Old Trafford and Milton Keynes. And of course we have the infrastructure in place from the 2012 Olympic Games.

Look at our competition. Russia, with its nascent racism and rampant corruption. A joint bid from Spain and Portugal as well as those tiny countries Belgium and the Netherlands.

Assuming the 2018 World Cup goes to Europe it has to be England.

Unfortunately World Cups are rarely about football. They are political largesse and the members who decide who will host a World Cup are political animals and when it comes to sports politics the English are neophytes.

We may have David Beckham but it’s people like the CONCACAF Chairman Jack Warner who will decide who is successful and who is not.

Warner plays the game with the subtlety of a street fighter. He has gone on record as saying that ‘for Europe, England is an irritant’ and ‘nobody in Europe likes England’ only to apologise when England promised to play his country, Trinidad & Tobago, in a friendly.

England, with our notions of fair play and steady on old chap, stand no chance against the likes of him.

Our efforts to be hosts aren’t helped by FIFA’s ‘flexible’ approach to hosts and why they select a certain host. Legacy is a buzz word for these people and one reason why South Africa got the nod for 2010 was the legacy for Africa as a whole. That African football would benefit later on down the line from it’s first ever tournament.

The same argument was also applied in 2002 when Japan and South Korea co-hosted and 1994 when the USA got the games. The World Cup, it was presumed, would generate unprecedented interest in the game locally and within the region.

That’s all nice and dandy as far as it goes.

But what about Germany in 2006? France in 1998? Italy in 1990? Spain in 1982? West Germany in 1974? There was little or no legacy from those old Europe countries hosting the games. And the fact that the Germans have twice being host tells you all about how they play the game compared to the way England pussy foot round the corridors of power.

But with a Russian bid on the table FIFA can now get back on their high horse and pontificate about how Russia is new Europe, about how it’s time for Eastern Europe to take centre stage.

The FIFA members are already in England as they assess each individual bid. They’ll know about Wembley, they’ll know about Bobby Charlton. They’ll expect cucumber sandwiches at the finest hotels and they’ll expect obsequious officials to try and ingratiate themselves.

But that may count for nothing if England’s Prime Minister, David Cameroon, continues with his holidays and sends his deputy instead to meet them.

Yes, we gave the game to the world. But unless we get street smart we may never host football’s greatest show again.

This first appeared in Jakarta Globe in 2010

# posted by Me @ 4:18 AM