Huge cost of bidding war
JUST a few weeks before FIFA’s Executive Committee voted to award the 2018 and 2022 World Cups to Russia and Qatar respectively, two members of the 24-man panel were banned from football for corruption.
Of the 22 who remained, no fewer than 13 of them were eventually suspended or fined over their conduct – including FIFA president Sepp Blatter and his UEFA counterpart Michel Platini.
Blatter’s admission that the decision to award the finals to Russia was always going to be made meant that the FA had wasted £21million in their bid to take the finals to England for the first time since 1966.
Simon Johnson,
(right) who was chief operating officer of the bid in 2010, felt that the FA should have taken legal action.
“It’s an absolute scandal,” said
Johnson, who had previously been a top sports and media lawyer.
“They should bring an action to recover the costs of a bidding process that was neither fair nor transparent and we’ve now discovered was rigged.
“The FA entered into a contract with FIFA to run a bid in accordance with certain rules – and, in my view, that contract was invalidated.”
The fall-out from that vote led to an overhaul of FIFA’s process for choosing which nations should host future World Cups.
Each of the 211 nations who are members of FIFA now have a vote in the hope that it lessens the possibility of corruption.
The successful bidder needs 105 votes. But it is usual for countries to vote in line with the recommendation of the confederation they belong to.
UEFA, with 55 members, is the largest of the six confederations.