The Name of The Game

Dominic Lawson writes:

"You could not but notice the clamour around the world for change", the minister told John Humphrys yesterday. This was not, as you might have thought, a reference to the political upheavals in the Middle East and North Africa. No, this was the sports minister, Hugh Robertson, and he was talking about the management of Fifa, the body in charge of various international football tournaments.

A trivial matter as it might seem to those of us immune to their charms, these kicking competitions are almost more important than life itself for much of the British media. That is why the BBC yesterday led all its television and radio news bulletins with speculative accounts of what a Swiss soccer potentate named Sepp Blatter might or might not do about allegations of corruption within his organisation; that is why our sports minister was allocated the signal honour of a prime-time chat with the BBC's heaviest-hitting interviewer.

I wish the normally severe Mr Humphrys had stopped Hugh Robertson in his tracks, upon hearing his melodramatic assertion that there was "clamour around the world for change". What clamour around the world? There's no such clamour coming from China, or India, or Russia, or.... well, where is it coming from? England, is the answer, in the wake of the Football Association's failure to gain more than two delegates' votes (one of them its own) in last December's ballot to determine the venue of the 2018 World Cup.

It was Russia that secured the right to hold the event; given that it is as soccer-crazed a nation as ours, and has never held the competition before, it seemed an unexceptionable decision; but this is not a view widely held in England, where it is assumed that it was only bribery and chicanery in defiance of our own unarguable right to stage the event that led the delegates from other football associations to pick Russia ahead of us.

If any nations had a right to query the outcome of the votes last December, it was those (which included Australia and the United States) who lost out to tiny Qatar in the simultaneous ballot to allocate the right to hold the 2022 World Cup. As the owner of 15 per cent of the world's gas reserves, the absolute monarchy of Qatar can buy pretty much whatever it likes on behalf of a citizenry of barely 300,000: and according to the disgruntled losers in the vote over the 2022 World Cup, that is exactly what it has done with football's most illustrious tournament.

Admittedly it might seem odd – not to say life-threatening – to hold the tournament in a country where summer temperatures reach 120 degrees Fahrenheit; but the Qataris have pledged to build air-conditioned stadia – and then to dismantle them and reassemble them in poorer countries after the event is over. While I can understand the Australians' anger at losing out to such hydrocarbon-financed largesse, there is in fact a good geographical reason for finding Qatar more suitable. It is only three hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time, and so well suited to hundreds of millions of Europe's football fans, at least in so far as live television viewing is concerned – which, after all, generates Fifa's revenue. Australia is a great sporting nation, but in prime-time television time zone terms it's the back of beyond (with all due respect to the Samoans and sundry other Polynesian islanders).

Such talk of prime-time television advertising slots may appear crassly commercial, but the whole World Cup circus is nothing more than a business venture, masquerading as national interests. Our own Football Association is typical, being a private body funded by commercial activities and its leading figures appointed not by government but by the Premier League, which is in turn financed by the sale of television rights, the tab for which in its turn is picked up by sponsors and advertisers. So when newspapers call on the British Government to "do something" about the financial shenanigans within football's world governing body, it makes no more sense than asking the British Government to "do something" about the way Bernie Ecclestone runs Formula One.

As Mihir Bose, the former BBC sports editor, pointed out yesterday, the only people who can bring about the change for which our sports minister claims the "whole world is clamouring" are the bosses of such firms as Coca-Cola and Adidas, Fifa's ultimate paymasters. If they no longer wish to be associated with Fifa, then Mr Blatter will indeed be in deep trouble – but so far there is no sign that they are sufficiently unhappy with his decisions, which cannot yet be said to have caused them significant embarrassment.

It remains the case that the English press and football emissaries (whose number includes Prince William, flown out to be an FA meeter and greeter at the December meeting of Fifa's governing body), wail that "We wuz robbed" of the right to hold the 2018 World Cup finals. That feeling may be shared by hundreds of thousands of English soccer fans, but for the majority of the nation who regard the game with feelings ranging from active dislike to indifference, this failure (whether or not the result of under-the-table payments) is something to be welcomed.

The people of South Africa will for decades be paying for their staging of the 2010 World Cup, for which the costs – surprise, surprise – escalated to approximately seven times the budget promised at the time of the bid. A similar escalation has made a predictable mockery of our own government's pledge to taxpayers made at the time of Britain's unfortunately successful bid to hold the 2012 Olympics.

There were also the usual grotesque overestimates about how the Olympics would boost the host city's income from tourism. As the European Tour Operators Association pointed out in a stinging rebuke to the London 2012 Organising Committee: "Our study shows that there is no strong link between hosting sporting events and increased tourism ... there appears little evidence of any benefit to tourism of hosting an Olympic Games and considerable evidence of damage." One reason is that (justifiable) fear of ramped-up hotel prices deter all but the most sports-obsessed travellers.

When England lost out at the vote for the 2018 World Cup, the London Mayor, Boris Johnson, grandly announced that he was with immediate effect withdrawing his offer to put up Mr Blatter and assorted other Fifa dignitaries free of charge in the eye-wateringly expensive Dorchester Hotel during the 2012 Olympics. Apparently our 2018 World Cup bid had included the promise to pay the £1,000-a-night costs of these Dorchester suites. Johnson's high-profile act of pique was hailed by the British media; but it ought to have given rise to a very different observation: wasn't the original offer of free accommodation in Park Lane's smartest hotel, during an event technically unrelated to the World Cup, exactly the sort of bribery which we were whining about, as alleged victims?

More to the point, given that there are no objective economic benefits to the nations holding such competitions (whatever the kudos to local political dignitaries such as Boris Johnson) shouldn't we as taxpayers feel grateful if other countries managed to offer more successful bribes? They, and not us, are the ones who've been Blattered.