On the British domestic front the big freeze continues. Our complete national inability to cope with changes in the weather has been demonstrated by the Scottish Premier League cancelling all games this weekend, a decision they made yesterday. Ironically the Scottish Football League which organises the second, third and fourth tiers of the game north of the border has allowed its clubs to make their own decisions with match referees, although seven League and Scottish Cup games have already been postponed until next midweek.
I only hope we don’t see the same over the top Nanny Stateism from Islington Council or the Metropolitan Police which forced the postponement of our home game against Bolton Wanderers back in January. Especially having qualified for the semi-finals of the Carling Cup in which we’ve drawn Ipswich Town (whom we still owe for the 1978 FA Cup Final. Yes, I have a very long memory, especially as I was at Wembley that day!), the last thing we need is a postponement.
On the international front, the domestic game proved to be unable to cope with the political weather. As I predicted in my Monday blog Russia and Qatar were the victorious nations when FIFA president Sepp Blatter opened the envelopes in Zurich yesterday evening. England was eliminated in the first round of balloting amongst the 22 FIFA executive committee (ExCo) members entitled to vote. Two ExCo members, Amos Adamou of Nigeria and Reynald Tamarii of Tahiti have been banned from football administration for three years and one year respectively by FIFA’s ethics committee following bribery charges and have not been replaced by the Confederation of African Football (CAF) and the Oceania Football Confederation respectively.
The reaction in England has varied from astonishment to anger to the borders of xenophobia. I wasn’t surprised. I thought England would struggle to get past the first round of voting. It is a sadness to me that I proved to be absolutely right. The English bid only got two votes, one of which will have been former FA chairman Geoff Thompson the FIFA vice-president representing the home football associations of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, a position created as part of the deal bringing the FA, the SFA, FAW and IFA back into FIFA membership after an effective boycott of participation in FIFA lasting 41 years from 1919-1946.
The other vote for England is said to have come from one of Thompson’s fellow FIFA vice-presidents, CAF president Issa Hayatou of Cameroon who has been at daggers drawn with Blatter since he unsuccessfully ran the latter for the FIFA presidency in 2006 by 139 votes to 56. Hayatou is likely to face a challenge to his position as CAF president next year from Danny Jordaan of South Africa. It may be that his vote, assuming it was him, for England, was a two fingered salute to Blatter from somebody feeling demob happy.
There are sources suggesting that prior to the voting, done by an exhaustive secret ballot with the bidder receiving the lowest number of votes being eliminated until one bid has an absolute majority, Blatter gave the ExCo a “pep talk” showing the members cuttings from the British press and making it clear that his preference was for Russia.
Russia got the thirteen votes it needed for victory in the second round of voting, the Iberian (Spain & Portugal) getting seven votes and the Low Countries (Belgium & the Netherlands) getting two. Russia kicked off the first round with nine votes, gaining four in the second ballot.
In the voting for 2022 it took four ballots for Qatar to get the votes it needed. However the small Arab emirate (the country is one of the few absolute monarchies left in the world) got eleven votes in the first round leaving it all to do for the other bidding nations. The only country to do worse in the voting than England was Australia, which received only one vote in the first round, which I’m guessing was Geoff Thompson.
I’ve no doubt that Australia, an absolutely sports daft country, would have hosted a great World Cup. It being the southern hemisphere winter in June and July there, the weather would have perfect for football, even in tropical Queensland. I don’t think South Korea or Japan ever had much of a chance having hosted the tournament jointly in 2002. Everybody thought the USA were the raging favourites for 2022. I always had a sneaking feeling that Blatter wanted to take the World Cup somewhere different.
That’s turned out to be exactly right. Qatar is definitely different. It also has HUGE challenges to overcome, not the least that summer temperatures in the Arabian Gulf can reach fifty degrees Celsius (120 degrees Fahrenheit). That’s far too hot to watch football, never mind play the game. Qatar intends to combat this with cutting edge cooling technology powered by solar energy (one thing Arabia doesn’t suffer from any lack of is constant sunshine). This, it is said, brings down the ambient pitch level temperature by twenty degrees. Most of the nine new stadia to be constructed by Qatar will be “flat-pack” grounds designed to be disassembled and moved to poorer nations in Asia and Africa as part of the tournament’s lasting legacy.
One other thing that Qatar doesn’t lack is lolly. Qatar is a big oil exporter and has huge natural gas reserves. Basically they’re rolling in energy dollars. They plan to spend US$40 BILLION (about £25.64 billion) just on railway and tram networks to move fans around the venues and new airport facilities. The improvements to three existing grounds and nine new grounds has a budget of US$4 billion (around £2.564 billion), or nearly £216 million a pop which sounds about right. A further US$17 (around £10.9 billion) has been set aside for hotels and other tourist infrastructure. The cost of the hosting the world’s biggest single-sport event is already at nose-bleed inducing levels. With all other hosting costs (security, etc) Qatar can’t expect much change out of £50 billion, equivalent to over £150,000 for every one of Qatar’s 330,000 or so citizens (the rest of the population of around 1.6 million are foreign ex-pats).
There are a number of other issues, to say the least. Gay sex is punishable by hefty fines and up to five years in jail for non-Muslim foreigners and flogging for Muslims subject to Sharia law of whatever nationality, so no getting your freak on with a member of the same sex if you’re gay or bi. This is an offence even in private. There’s also the issue of religious freedom. Qatari law restricts the open practice of any other religion other than Islam, although Christian churches are increasingly permitted. The first Roman Catholic church was consecrated in 2008. Broadly speaking Qatar is at the liberal end of the Arab spectrum, but its light years away from what we’re accustomed to in Europe.
Turning to Russia there are huge challenges there too. They’re also going to have to build just about everything they need from stadia to rail and air links. Although the tournament will be restricted to the European sector of Russia west of the Ural mountain range in four geographic clusters (as Brazil intend in 2014) the tournament will still cover a vast area. They also have four years less than Qatar to get everything built. Russia is also afflicted with a deep strain of xenophobia and racism. Just talk to any black player who has played there and to black fans who have visited. Fans of British clubs and the England and Wales national teams have been targeted not only by demented local neo-Nazis but also corrupt police officers “on the demand”.
One Gooner who was in Moscow for our Champions League game against Lokamotiv Moscow in 2003 went for a leak before kick-off. On attempting to return to the visitors’ section he was told by a policeman that he was drunk and had to pay a US$100 fine to be re-admitted to the section. Literally hundreds of England fans were attacked before and after the Russia v England European Championship qualifier in Moscow in 2007.
It’s easy to draw the conclusion that nobody else in world football likes England after yesterday’s vote. But should we care? Let’s have it right, FIFA is rife with corruption and cronyism. It badly needs to be fixed. That isn’t going to happen if we take our ball home. We’re seen as arrogant and condescending by many elsewhere in Europe, never mind the rest of the world. That charge isn’t without merit I’m afraid.
A very telling statement was made by Mike Lee, the British spin doctor who has played a key part in Qatar’s successful bid for 2022. Lee used to work for the Premier League as its main media man before joining UEFA in a similar role. He was a key player in London’s successful bid for the 2012 Summer Olympics. I took an instant and I think mutual dislike to Lee when I came across him in a work capacity. That dislike didn’t stop me respecting his professional abilities which are considerable.
Lee said yesterday that the Qatar bid presentation was the first to use any language other than English. English is the international language of business. Native English speaking countries tend to be very lazy and uninterested in learning or using any other language. That’s a big, big mistake in my experience. I’m not saying that just deploying speakers of other languages would have made all the difference, but it is very important.
The England bid also reflected the deep divisions and animosities within our game with constant in-fighting and turf wars within the bid team and its governing board. The Daily Mail didn’t help with its spiteful sting operation against then FA and bid chairman Lord David Triesman back in May. It was gratuitous and revealed no unethical or illegal misconduct on Triesman’s part, just loose lips in what he thought was a private conversation. The Panorama programme broadcast on Monday night didn’t help in terms of the timing, nor did the Sunday Times story which led to two FIFA ExCo members being suspended, along with four other officials.
I happen to think that a free and enquiring media is essential to functioning civil society. For me, The Sunday Times investigation was fair game. I don’t have any problem with the Panorama programme either. I was of the opinion that it should have been delayed until after the bid vote, but I’ve changed my mind about that. The damage to the bid was done as soon as the making of the programme was known to the venal, corrupt egomaniacs that infest the world governing body of our game.
I could go on forever. This already the longest blog I’ve ever done for arsenalinsider.com already. It’s also not well-structured. I wanted to get some thoughts out there quickly though. I’m a football internationalist. I really wanted the World Cup in Britain. No doubt David Dein, belatedly brought in by England 2018 as international president is sick. I’ve severely criticised Dein for selling out his Arsenal shares to Alisher Usmanov in the past. I stand by that criticism. I’ve never doubted his commitment to the international game however and his desire to advance England’s cause.
He would be a much, much better representative of the home nations on the FIFA executive committee than the invisible, ineffectual Geoff Thompson. He must heartbroken that the tens of thousands of miles he’s covered at 12,000 metres on international flights only garnered one vote over and above Thompson’s. His grandchildren will be using the air miles he will have accumulated.
Meanwhile, let’s worry about three crucial League points at stake with the visit of Fulham to the Grove tomorrow afternoon. We need to quickly build some consistency in the League.
Keep the faith!
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