“It is one thing to fill your bid with politicians, but we are not talking about politics here. We are talking about Realpolitik. There is a difference.” — a Fifa insider, talking on condition of anonymity.
On the day that England officially opened its bid to host the 2018 World Cup finals last May, in the appropriate surroundings of the Bobby Moore Suite at Wembley Stadium, it was hard to resist the heady feeling that football was finally coming home, even if, in a nod to the acute sensitivities of the vote-winning campaign ahead, that particular phrase had been declared off-limits.
The preferred slogan — less imperial, more inclusive — was “England United, The World Invited”, but, as the months have passed, the prospect has arisen, not for the first time, of a party falling flat. Jack Warner, the most outspoken and most visible of the 24 constituents on the Fifa executive committee, has as good as returned his invite with an angry no — along with a £230 Mulberry handbag, more on which later — but more troubling are rumblings of dissatisfaction elsewhere on the executive committee and now, most alarming of all, growing tension on the home front.
At the centre of it all is the divisive figure of Lord Triesman, the chairman of the FA and of the English bid. It was Triesman who bore the brunt of Warner’s anger over the gift of a handbag to his wife and it is Triesman who is facing criticism from Lord Coe, Sir Keith Mills and several others on the board of England 2018.
The fear, which has been put to him by Coe in particular, is that the opportunity to bring the World Cup back to England for the first time since 1966 is in danger of slipping through the nation’s fingers.
Advertisement
Not so, according to the official line from the bid team. They tell a story of having paced themselves — of the benefits of having launched their bid early, five months earlier than the joint Spanish-Portuguese bid, and of having left enough time to iron out any teething troubles and to build up the momentum between now and election day in December 2010 — which, if it turns out that way, will be a cause for joy and congratulation.
They also paint a picture of having worked harder and made more progress than any of their rivals in attempting to woo the members of the executive committee.
In the past fortnight, presentations have been made to Michel Platini, the Uefa president, and to Dr Nicol?s L?oz, of Paraguay, and Marios Lefkaritis, of Cyprus. This week’s trip to Doha, for England’s friendly match against Brazil, will offer the opportunity for face-to-face discussions with Mohamed bin Hammam, of Qatar.
Yet the aforementioned Fifa insider talks of considerable aversion to the English bid elsewhere on the executive committee. Why? “The first thing is, you don’t mess with Jack Warner. He’s a powerful guy. That was a big mistake. A big, big mistake.” But surely Warner’s is only one vote out of 24? “No, it’s at least another two votes and probably more like another three or four votes. Warner is very powerful, especially in Africa. He’s very close to [Issa] Hayatou in Cameroon, [Jacques] Anouma in Ivory Coast, [Hany] Abou Rida in Egypt and others. They will make their own minds up, but they will not be impressed by what has happened with Warner.”
The strange thing about all of this is that the much-discussed insult to Warner — whose family, through its travel firm, was found to have made £500,000 from selling match tickets at three times face value at the 2006 World Cup in Germany — appears to have been a product of the man’s imagination.
Advertisement
Acting within the guidelines of the competition, the England bid team decided to send a £230 Mulberry handbag as a gift to the wives of each of the 24 executive committee members. Warner returned the gift to Triesman, stating that it had become “a symbol of derision, betrayal and embarrassment for me and my family”.
Warner, the Concacaf president, did not take issue with the gift itself, but that it been made public. After writing to Triesman, he was furious that news of his letter found its way into the press, again blaming the FA chairman.
But it would seem almost inconceivable that anyone on the English bid team was guilty of leaking the story, given that that handbags had already become such a source of embarrassment.
These are the problems of dealing with such an unpredictable electorate. Warner is far from the only complicated character involved, but it was he, sitting in his office in Port of Spain in June last year, who summed up the absurd nature of the bidding process when he said, in the space of five minutes, that, “England is the country best qualified to host a World Cup”, “England has consistently had the best bid for hosting the World Cup” but that “over the past 25 years I’ve seen some super bids, first-class bids lose to inferior bids based on the warmth of the bidder. It might be wrong, but it tells you that voting is about emotion”.
It comes back to that word: Realpolitik, politics based on self-interest or power rather than moral or idealistic concerns. When the executive committee members go to ballot in December next year, many will do so thinking less about what is best for the World Cup than about what is best for them and for their national interests. Trade-offs and flattery will get you everywhere.
Advertisement
There is one other notable hurdle that the English bid faces: the unwelcome attention of a media that, in sticking up for the bid in the face of Warner’s perceived bullying, may have done more harm than good.
There is a duty to get behind the bid, to show the world how much England, as a nation, wants to host the World Cup. But right now there is a worrying feeling, emanating from inside the bid team, that football is not coming home, that a great opportunity is slipping away. Early days these may be, but it is time to step up the bid — before it is too late.