Mihir Bose

England’s botched bid to stage the 2018 World Cup

The murky world of football politics requires special skills which our team seems to lack, says Mihir Bose

To understand how World Cup bids are won, let me take you to the third-floor suite of Dolder Grand hotel overlooking Lake Zurich. The date is May 2004 and the cast as high-powered as you would expect in any political summit. There was Thabo Mbeki, then president of South Africa, and Nelson Mandela, his predecessor. They had come to meet Jack Warner, the Trinidadian vice-president of FIFA — the organisation which controls world football. Warner had been sympathetic to South Africa’s bid for the 2010 World Cup, but had suddenly turned cold — refusing to return any calls to Cape Town. So the South Africans had come to see him.

Mandela, of course, was South Africa’s trump card. Just what these men discussed has never been revealed, but I caught up with Warner in the corridor immediately after the meeting and he said: ‘Who knows? Anything can happen.’ Then he gave a big smile suggesting he was once again South Africa’s friend.

Until that moment the Moroccans were very sure that they had secured Warner’s votes. They had spent millions on their campaign, employing so many experts from all over the world that theirs was almost an ‘outsourced’ bid. They had expected to beat South Africa by 14 votes to ten. In the event, they were defeated by 14 to ten.

Warner, a former Port of Spain schoolteacher, is a hugely controversial figure who is believed to have accumulated a £30 million fortune through international football. He has even been reprimanded by his fellow FIFA executive members for the way he and his son handled the sale of tickets for the last World Cup. But that the South Africans deployed Mandela, the nearest to a modern-day Gandhi, on a figure like Warner shows how high the stakes were.

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