World Cup 2010 : England fails

May 16, 2011, 1:04 AM GMT+0

For all the optimism, for all the effort and for all the heavyweight lobbying, England’s bid to host the 2018 Fifa World Cup came to nothing. The presence at Fifa’s headquarters in Zurich of the Prime Minister, Prince William and the prince of English football royalty, David Beckham, seems in the end to have made hardly a difference. England was knocked out in the first round of voting, having secured only two votes. Is anyone to blame? And does it matter anyway?

It obviously matters to millions of football fans in this country. England has not hosted the event since 1966. A decade or more ago hopes were raised that forty years later, in 2006, it would be England’s opportunity again but such hopes turned out to be a pipedream. Now the hopes of 2018 have gone up in smoke too and by the time the next chance comes around there will be few English football supporters left alive who remember the last time the world came here to fight for football’s greatest crown and the last time England seized it.

It may matter too for the economy. Some flag-wavers for England’s 2018 bid claimed that it would have been worth billions for the British economy. Maybe; though such claims are always made by the backers of such bids and perhaps we need to wait to see what the net cost of the 2012 London Olympics turns out to be before we can assess what has been lost by this week’s failure in Zurich.

The failure may matter too for David Cameron. He invested a lot of political capital and three days of his time this week commuting backwards and forwards to Switzerland to secure the prize only to see it won by Russia, whose prime minister, Vladimir Putin, didn’t even bother to leave Moscow. There will be those keen to draw the contrast with Tony Blair’s lobbying success in snatching the Olympics for London when the world believed it had already been sewn up by Paris. Perhaps this self-dubbed ‘son of Blair’ doesn’t have the flair his mentor had.

At this point some people will say that the whole business has got ludicrously out of proportion. Whatever, they will ask, is a prime minister doing devoting three days to the vain attempt merely to get a sporting fixture to come to Britain when he faces really serious matters, like getting the economy back on its feet, extricating British troops out of Afghanistan or making sure that highly contentious policies, such as higher student fees and savage public spending cuts, don’t turn the country into an ungovernable battleground of contending forces. David Cameron’s decision to give up his time on this goose chase, they will say, is confirmation of a flippant populism and a quite mad British obsession with a mere game.

To this, others will say such a charge could be made only by people who have no understanding of the beautiful game. It’s no good, they will argue, simply to dismiss football as no more than a bunch of wildly overpaid and vain young men kicking a ball about. It may be that but it is also, as David Beckham put it, something that 'runs through our DNA'. Any British political leader has to recognise that and then do his duty.

But should that include paying homage to an institution that is widely charged with being corrupt to its roots, where votes are courted not only by what is euphemistically called ‘politicking’ but also by straightforward financial bribery, estimated in some quarters at around $100m? Is there any other walk of life (except, perhaps, arms dealing) where a prime minister would be expected to overlook such widely made accusations of corruption in order to secure something of advantage to his country?

The talk of corruption immediately turns attention to the issue of who might be to blame for England’s failure to secure the World Cup. Had it not been for the Sunday Times and the BBC’s Panorama programme digging up the dirt on the alleged corruption of various members of Fifa’s decision-making executive committee, then England might have stood a chance, many will say. After all, if you’re trying to persuade a group of powerful people to do something you want them to do, it’s not exactly clever to begin by accusing them of being corrupt.

To which journalists will answer that it is their job to tell it as it is and to have no other concerns. If there is evidence of the highest authority in the world’s favourite sport being riddled with corruption, then it is in the public interest for this to be known.

The row about who is blame for England’s failure and whether it matters is likely to go on for sometime among those who feel keenly the disappointment that England has been passed over yet again. But there is a broader issue which may concern not just football fans but followers of many other sports. It’s the question of whether ‘big sport’ has become so corrupted that it no longer bears any relation to the amateur games and the ethos of those games from which ‘big sport’ has evolved.

For it is not only football that is accused of being lost not only to commercial interest but to outright corruption. Cricket has surely now lost forever its association with an irreproachable morality ('that’s just not cricket!'). The Olympics have long since lost the aura which attached to them when they were genuinely an amateur contest. Drug-taking and other banned performance-enhancing techniques have corrupted athletics. Other sports too have lost their ethos by becoming ‘big’.

To those who for this reason look askance at ‘big sport’ as a fundamental corruption of something that had real value, the loss of the 2018 World Cup will be something for which England should be thankful. Yet to many such a high-minded attitude is irrelevant. What they will be feeling is simply an acute disappointment that a great jamboree will be taking place elsewhere.

What’s your view? Are you disappointed or relieved that England has failed to secure the 2018 World Cup or don’t you care either way? Should David Cameron have devoted so much time and effort to the bid? Should the Sunday Times and Panorama have run the stories about alleged corruption in Fifa or not? Do you think it affected England’s chances? How corrupt, if at all, do you think Fifa is? Do you think it matters? And what do you make of the argument that all ‘big sport’ is now a corruption of something that used to be valuable and worthwhile?