Sports minister: England bid never had chance
Reuters - Thursday 06 October 2011, 14:52
England would never have launched
a bid to stage the World Cup in 2018 if world governing body
FIFA had said at the outset that it wanted to take the
tournament to new frontiers, British sports minister Hugh
Robertson said on Thursday.
He told delegates at the Leaders in Football conference that
if FIFA had been more open about its objectives, the British
government and the Football Association would never have spent
15 million pounds on producing a brilliant bid
which FIFA had no interest in.
"Looking back now I wish we had had the gumption and the
knowledge at a very early stage to realise that FIFA wanted
something fundamentally different from what we were putting on
the table," Robertson said.
"We were saying we could run the best possible football
tournament and the evaluation commission ruled we had the best
technical bid.
"The problem was that wasn't what FIFA wanted. They wanted
the opportunity to take the next World Cups to markets they had
not penetrated in any way before, so actually it did not matter
how good our bid was, we were never in the game at all."
England, which hosted the World Cup in 1966, bid to stage
the tournament along with eventual winners Russia and joint bids
from Portugal/Spain and Belgium/Netherlands but were eliminated
in the first round of polling among members of FIFA's Executive Committee.
England's bid received just two votes, one of which
was from its own representative.
Russia, which had never staged the finals before, won on the
second round of voting with 13 votes ahead of the two
joint-bids.
Robertson was asked if he regretted the bid taking place.
"No sports minister could sit here and be absolutely
confident about a bid that cost sport in this country 15 million
pounds that could have been invested somewhere else," he said.
"I wish we had had the foresight or the knowledge to
appreciate that earlier. We produced the best technical bid of
the lot, and it attracted one other vote apart from our own.
Nobody in football, or in the government, could be happy about a
bidding process that produced that outcome."
He added it was "absolutely right" that British Prime
Minister David Cameron and Prince William were involved in the
bidding process and went to Zurich to meet executive committee
members just before the vote.
Asked how Cameron reacted to the humiliating defeat,
Robertson said: "He was intensely disappointed and very very
irritated.
"He's not the sort of person to kick the wall but it's a
pretty sad day when you look the Prime Minister of this country
in the eye, promise you their vote and don't do so."
FIFA also awarded the 2022 World Cup to the tiny Gulf state
of Qatar, a decision that has been the subject of considerable
debate ever since.