England would host a great World Cup – don’t be ashamed to say it
NO SOONEr had Boris Johnson announced the desire to bid for the 2030 World Cup, the grovelling began. The Prime Minister was wrong to talk of bringing football home. ‘It’s a tired mantra,’ cautioned Lord Coe. ‘The watchword for this campaign has to be humility.’
Actually, that’s the watchword for every campaign. We bow, we scrape, we Uriah Heep our way around the globe. We’re the anti-lobbyists, apologising for our every action, humiliating ourselves at every turn. We’re so desperate to be liked, it’s almost repulsive. And liked by who? Crooks. Charlatans.
The organisation that gave the World Cup to systemic drug cheats, to repressive regimes; that left the process open to the most appalling corruption.
Of the 22 FIFA council members who sent the World Cup to russia and Qatar, 10 have been banned for ethical breaches, a further four have been implicated in cases of criminal corruption and two have been accused but never prosecuted. And we’re the ones who have to be humble? For risk of upsetting this wholesome football family?
Coe is right. The idea of football coming home is tiresome. But not because it is presumptuous or arrogant; because it’s a 25- year- old slogan from an historic tournament and we really should have written some new material by now.
It was funny as a meme when England got to the semi-finals in 2018, but as the peg to hang a campaign on, it just sounds old.
Johnson isn’t a football man, we know that. If he’d had his way as Foreign Secretary, England wouldn’t even have been present in russia — he wanted to boycott over the Salisbury poisonings — so he’s clung to this because he’s a populist and it plays to his idea of post-Brexit Britain’s place in the world. Our game. We invented it. And hosting the World Cup shows we’re still huge international players.
Yet, realistically, given that all 27 European Union countries are also UEFA members, and that one European host candidate is to be proposed, who do you think the European nations would rather support? The country that told them to get stuffed in 2016 and then took all the vaccines, or Spain and Portugal, the other bidders? Let’s face it, before we start, it’s hard for England to even get out of this group.
SO WHY not tell the truth? Not that football’s coming home, not those tired cliches, but the truth of a tournament in England and the British Isles.
That nobody would have to die to build the stadiums; that we don’t mind if you’re gay; that we wouldn’t have to put 40,000 special policemen on the streets to keep it safe; that we don’t have a state- sponsored doping programme; that we rather value personal freedom; that we’re quite experienced in putting on big tournaments and events; that our stadiums are already good to go; that none of them will end up derelict, or as bus garages; that we really, really love football and have been itching to host this for decades.
Now, it’s a personal view, but if football does come home in 2030, the World Cup’s centenary year, it should go to South America, the continent that hosted 100 years ago. Some part, certainly, should be with Uruguay, the original hosts. England didn’t even enter the competition until 1950.
It’s hard to claim a centenary World Cup for a country that wanted no part in it for 20 years.
Yet worse would be to campaign while refusing to champion what this country did bring to the game. Codified rules, the first leagues and cups, superb modern stadiums, all that wonderful history, a global sport that grew from here. Greg Clarke inserted the word ‘English’ before Football Association to not appear arrogant on the world stage.
That’s the poorest of all strategies. Obsequiousness won’t win a bid, but denies the heritage that is this country’s unique selling point. It was ‘ The FA’ because, at the time, there wasn’t another one. It did not need distinguishing.
And while that doesn’t make the World Cup our birthright, we shouldn’t have to pretend it wasn’t so. Football isn’t coming home, but England could host a very good World Cup — and shouldn’t be ashamed to say so.