You can bet on anything these days. Crossfit. Portuguese futsal. Even ByuL versus Rogue in Starcraft II. Yet, curiously, finding odds about who will host the 2026 World Cup is nigh-on impossible – even though the vote between the Nafta bloc of the US, Canada and Mexico, and new kid on the block Morocco is only six weeks away.
One bookie told me he would be “asking to be picked off” if he offered prices, given the votes for mega-events such as the World Cups and Olympics. As he put it: “You only really get action from people who know something we don’t.”
Yet this time it is supposed to be different. Fifa has ripped up its rulebook following the fallout from awarding the 2018 and 2022 World Cup finals to Russia and Qatar respectively. It has promised greater scrutiny of bids, more transparency, and, most dramatically, changed voting rules so its 211 member associations will decide who hosts rather than two dozen senior executives.
The aim, according to a Fifa spokesman, is to “avoid a return to the secret and subjective decisions of the past”. Good luck with that. As the lack of bookies’ odds indicates, it’s hard to shake off the past. Look at the International Olympic Committee, which expanded its electorate after the Salt Lake City scandal – yet has been hit with investigations into vote-rigging when awarding the Rio and Tokyo Games.
Here is a radical suggestion. Give the World Cup – and the Olympics, for that matter – to the highest bidder.
Sure, it sounds crude. But it would at least be more honest. It recognizes that people are corruptible, and those with large enough wallets will always try to corrupt them. And so it stops it at a stroke. Why engage in backroom deals or bribes, for instance, when there is no advantage in doing so?
Think of the money that might be diverted into grassroots football and poorer nations. The Football Association lost £15m on England’s failed 2018 bid, as well as much of its dignity in cozying up to the likes of Jack Warner. Australia spent $40m of public money on its attempt to host in 2022. For what?
It would also stop political chicanery, too. Only last month US president, Donald Trump, sent a tweet that appeared close to breaching Fifa’s rules when he warned nations thinking of voting against the US/Canada/Mexico bid, saying: “It would be a shame if countries that we always support were to lobby against the US bid. Why should we be supporting these countries when they don’t support us [including at the United Nations]?”
However, Trump is far from alone. Before the 2018 World Cup vote, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin spent hours talking to Fifa delegates – and it probably was not about Moscow’s weather in June.
Of course rules would have to be put in place. Any bid would need to show it had the requisite stadia, security and infrastructure to host a World Cup. A country could not host the tournament more than once in a generation. And it would have to be seen as progressive on human rights and strong on anti-corruption. But once it passed those hurdles, it would be all systems go.
The worry, of course, is the World Cup would be tossed around the same four or five rich global powers. One idea to counter that would be to hold a lottery – rather than an auction – every fifth World Cup with the winner only having to pay a smaller fee, set in advance, to host the tournament.
Certainly David Forrest, an economist at the University of Liverpool, believes the benefits of an auction would negate the downsides. As he explains, in a sense there is already an auction for the World Cup and Olympics. It’s just that countries are spending millions on wooing potential voters – money that would be much better spent going straight into the sport if they win (and not spurned if they didn’t).
As he put it: “A transparent auction would see the money from the highest bid go to Fifa itself rather than to the pockets of Fifa’s voters, and it could be earmarked for supporting recreational football in poor countries. Some of it could be put into a reserve for subsidizing a less-developed nation to host the competition every fifth tournament.”
That is a battle for another day. For now, Fifa watchers are trying to decipher exactly what will happen when the vote finally takes place on June 13.
Some insist a shock Morocco win is now on the cards because Trump has alienated so many African nations by calling them “shithole countries”. Others whisper that some Fifa countries want to give the US a bloody nose in retaliation for the Department of Justice’s 2015 investigation into football-related corruption.
Yet it is easy to be seduced by the counterpoints – that Fifa president Gianni Infantino wants the World Cup back in the US because it could generate $5bn (£3.58bn) in economic activity, far higher than its rival, along with suggestions that Morocco’s bid still has to convince Fifa’s scrutineers to get into the vote.
Either way, vast sums have already been spent. Some of that, surely, could have been saved by simply holding an auction.
The Guardian Sport
