I'm alright Jack: The men derailing England's 2018 FIFA World Cup bid
by Phil Lythell (Sportingo)
England will have to beg for the right to host the World Cup and this Sportingo author does not believe the indignity is worth it.
It is often said that politics and sport should never mix - but unfortunately that is said more in hope than expectation.
From the Berlin Olympics in 1936 to the so-called ‘Football War’ between Honduras and El Salvador in 1969, history is littered with examples that utterly refute that suggestion.
These days the politics may be less about socio-economic ideology but the stench of corruption and the inherent demand for sycophancy still pollutes sport wherever power and influence matters more than skill or physical talent.
I am talking, of course, about the bidding process to host the FIFA World Cup in 2018.
There are a number of factors that need to be taken into account when choosing the location of football’s greatest spectacle and England appears to tick every box that matters.
The most important of these is stadia and there can be no suggestion that England is not up there with the best in the world regarding both quantity and quality of football grounds. Even then the bid team are possibly planning to use new stadia built in Nottingham and/or Bristol so that the tournament touches each corner of the country.
Transport is another major issue. The land mass of England is tiny compared to the likes of Australia or Russia and with no grounds being more than five hours from each other getting around would pose no problem for teams, fans and officials presuming, of course, that there are no leaves on the line.
Security is the hot talking point of the 21st century and while no situation can completely elude a determined miscreant there are enough cctv cameras in the UK to stretch to the moon and back. Pitched together with a paranoid government and twitchy security services, we should all be pretty safe.
The love of football in these isles is also enough to guarantee commercial success for the tournament. Even if every Scotsman’s dream came true and England were to get knocked out in the first round, FIFA executives would have no problems paying for their frivolous lunches and sponsors would be left counting wads of cash.
Other issues such as grass roots development of the sport, off-setting the environmental impact of staging the finals and making suitable philanthropic gestures all need to be addressed by bidding teams.
But despite the amount of rhetoric that goes into bolstering the illusion that the bid that most ably fulfils these criteria will subsequently host the tournament, we all know that it is complete and utter nonsense.
It all comes down to personalities and one particularly obnoxious one is Jack Warner – the president of CONCACAF and a FIFA vice-president. The Trinidadian is said to control up to three votes amongst the 24-strong FIFA executive committee that decides these things and is a huge obstacle in the way of a successful England bid.
Warner, let's not forget, made around $1m by illegally selling tickets on the black market for the 2006 World Cup in Germany for up to three times their face value. Yet somehow he is still in a job and not in jail.
Another great moment in the life of ‘I’m alright’ Jack was when, in 2004, after Trinidad & Tobago had played a friendly against Scotland, he asked the then SFA president, John McBeth, to pay the appearance fee to him personally. McBeth sensibly smelt a rat and refused.
Warner, as president of the national FA, has also defaulted on bonus payments to the 2006 Trinidad & Tobago World Cup squad despite being ordered by an arbitration panel to do so.
Anyone reading the newspapers will have seen him being vociferously anti-England and his latest tantrum stems from a legitimate gift of a Mulberry handbag from the England bid team to his wife. Warner initially accepted the gift gratefully but then, under no duress, angrily returned it citing some fictional embarrassment to his family. A bit rich from someone with a past as dubious as his.
He has cited the English press as being unfair to him - but then what do you expect when you behave like a crook? The journalists are merely reporting what happens to be true.
Another delightful member of the committee is Argentina’s Julio Grondona, who has made such extraordinary remarks as "I do not believe a Jew can ever be a referee at this level. It's hard work and, you know, Jews don't like hard work."
FIFA President Sepp Blatter’s opinion of Grondona? “"Julio's a monumental man. We are friends for ever."
Together with the notoriously Anglophobic Michel Platini, at least one-sixth of the committee is made up of nefarious individuals with an axe to grind.
England’s only chance of success is to adhere to their eccentric demands such as Warner’s desire to meet the Queen and David Beckham which is obviously far more important to FIFA’s executive committee than the health and safety of spectators or the ability to cope with the threat of terrorism.
Surely England should not be selling its soul to these devils. The World Cup in England would be a magnificent once-in-a-lifetime experience but is it worth losing what remains of our integrity?
The Premier League is an extremely compelling competition and is the continent’s standard-bearer, so why allow outside influences such as Platini to dilute what we have just for a month's worth of entertainment in 2018?
Will all the excitement and cash generated from a successful four-week tournament really be enough to cleanse from us the filth from pandering to such an odious man as Jack Warner?
The simple answer is no. English football stands to lose too much and could change forever just for the sake of being briefly in the spotlight.
