So it Begins

England’s World Cup bid leadership on Thursday night claimed they had been lied to by Fifa executive committee members after suffering a humiliating defeat in the race for the 2018 tournament that saw them poll just two votes, one of which came from bid chairman Geoff Thompson.

After a catastrophic result that saw England ejected in the first round of voting as Russia stormed to a resounding win, bid chief executive Andy Anson said that Fifa members had reneged on commitments given in the build-up to the vote.

England 2018 were confident that they had a fighting chance of securing up to seven votes in the first round, a core that could have given them a platform for victory.  Instead concerns that Holland-Belgium could secure enough support to spring a first-round surprise were realised, and a backlash against hostile media coverage and a fundamental failure of influence undermined the last-ditch lobbying efforts of Cameraman, Ponce William and Becks.  Asked if he felt members had lied to the bid about their support Anson said:

“I do feel people let us down, I’d be lying if I said they didn’t. People who promised us our vote obviously went the other way.  I honestly felt that we had enough comfort, enough people, enough room to hope that things would go all right and we would go through the first round.”

Among the voters who abandoned England was Trinidad’s Jack Warner, who is understood to have told the Ponce at a meeting in Zurich this week that England had secured his vote.

The result, worse even than the failed 2006 bid that made it into the second round before being ejected, exposed the confidence engendered by the work of England’s ‘Three Lions’ and an outstanding final presentation as illusory.

There was resentment too that the strong technical merits of England’s bid– it was the most highly-rated on technical and economic grounds, had apparently been ignored.

Cameraman, who spent three days pressing England’s case in Zurich (top idea, ignore the climate crisis back home and gan off for a jolly), said Fifa had ignored the bids merits:

“According to Fifa we had the best technical bid and the strongest commercial bid and the country is passionate about football. But it turns out that is not enough.”

The adverse coverage of Fifa from the BBC Panorama programme and the Sunday Times allegations of corruption in the bidding process, also appear to have cost England.  It is understood that media coverage of the bidding race was raised by Fifa president Sepp Blatter at an executive committee meeting on Wednesday, and a cuttings file of the most negative coverage was handed round among the members.

You can read more on the post mortem at TTel.