Putin on a show

Unlike the tabloid media (sample headline: FIFA bungs* the Cup to Russia) I really can't get worked up about the fact that England will not be hosting the World Cup in 2018. As a fan, I'd have been happy to see the tournament here, but as a taxpayer I'm happy to be spared any possibility of a rerun of the scandalous cost overruns afflicting the 2012 Olympic Games.

For those not familiar with this, London won the Olympics on the basis of an entirely mendacious cost estimate of £2-3 billion. The Government only supported the bid because it never seriously believed that London would win; Paris was the strong favourite. Immediately after the Games were awarded to London, the costs soared to £9 billion, and the real number may be even higher than this. Needless to say, taxpayers would never have allowed the bid to go forward if they had had even the faintest inkling of the real costs that the bid committee was about to stick them with. And as the Games near, it's becoming ever clearer that the "legacy" of sports participation that was promised is unlikely ever to be realised.

In a parallel universe the head of the Olympic bid, Lord Coe, would be behind bars for his role in this fraud. Instead he was co-opted to help out with the World Cup bid. It's impossible to know whether the FIFA committee took the Olympic saga into account when it made its decision this week, but if they were fully informed about it, it certainly couldn't have helped.

The foreign media were reportedly amazed by the sense in the London media and among the public that England was in some way "entitled" to the World Cup. Sure, it's coming up for fifty years since the one and only time it was held here, but that can't be enough. Exactly what credentials does England have to offer? It can't be the national team, about which the less said the better. It can't be the development of the game at the grass roots: the UK has far fewer trained coaches than any other major football-playing nation, and school playing fields are being sold off for housing development at a depressing pace.

No, the defining characteristic of the English game is money, pure and simple. TV and sponsorship money has made the Premiership the world's richest league. However, because of the dearth of home-grown talent (see previous paragraph), it grabs more and more of its players from less wealthy leagues overseas -- which might not, you would have to think, count very positively with those countries when they cast their votes for who gets to host the World Cup. What's more, the money in English football is very unevenly shared. The Premiership controls the purse strings. For professional clubs at lower levels, it's a hand-to-mouth existence.

Even worse, the Premiership has no interest whatever in international football: witness the constant club vs. country battles every time a player gets injured while away on international duty. So, bizarrely enough, England's World Cup bid was in a sense mounted on the cheap. There was a lot of emphasis on the fact that most of the stadia are already in place, which certainly reduces the riskiness of the bid, but makes it hard to argue that it will produce the kind of "legacy" that FIFA is always so keen on (and which was such a large part of the Olympics bid).

If your football is mainly defined by how rich it is, you can't really complain too much if you lose out to someone with more money. For sure, in choosing Russia for 2018 and Qatar for 2022, FIFA has followed the money. Russia's oligarchs and the Qatari royal family were prepared to risk much more of it than England's bid could possibly match, mainly because the bid team, led by the Football Association, has no call on the big money in English football, which is controlled by the Premiership. (Long-time readers of this blog will asume that I'm about to blame the whole mess on Rupert Murdoch, the Premiership's paymaster. You might think that; I couldn't possibly comment).

Anyway, good luck to Russia as it prepares to stage the Cup. There's a prodigious amount of work to be done, especially in centres other than Moscow and St. Petersburg. Properly handled, the Cup could be a catalyst for the same sort of transformation in Russia that the Barcelona Olympics produced in that once rather dowdy city. That would be a real legacy.

* For non-UK readers: the word "bung" is often used in the media to refer to bribery, especially in relation to football. There's zero evidence of any bribery here, but of course that never stops the tabloid press.