World Cup Vote Full of Intrigue
It’s that time of year again, the time for conspiracy theories to rise to the surface like so many rats from a sewer.
On May 15, less than two weeks from now, the 24 members of FIFA’s executive committee will gather around a polished wooden table in Paris to decide which country will stage the 2010 World Cup.
In the running are Egypt, Libya, Morocco, South Africa and Tunisia.
Many observers say it is a two-horse race, with Morocco and South Africa running neck and neck down the stretch.
Similarly, many say the outcome will not necessarily be determined by which candidate is best qualified. Rather, they see the decision being made on the basis of envelopes stuffed with money changing hands surreptitiously in the small hours of the night, or other favors being traded in back-room deals.
If the stories are to be believed, that’s the way it was four years ago, when South Africa lost by a single vote to Germany in the bid to host the 2006 World Cup.
Then, in a memorably chaotic and controversial vote, New Zealand’s Charles Dempsey went against the wishes of the Oceania Football Confederation and abstained, rather than voting for South Africa as ordered.
That gave the victory to Germany.
Had Dempsey voted for South Africa, the resulting tie would have given Joseph “Sepp” Blatter, FIFA’s president, the deciding vote, and Blatter already was on record as saying that he wanted the World Cup to go to an African nation for the first time.
This time it will, but to which nation?
Dempsey said he had been intimidated and appalled by the skulduggery leading up to the vote. He retired not long thereafter, angered and disillusioned by what he viewed as the ugly politics and apparent corruption at the sport’s highest levels.
The World Cup means not only prestige but hundreds of millions of dollars to the winning bidder and so, to use a particularly African metaphor, the vultures are circling once again.
The vote this time around is likely to be just as close as in 2000 because a strong argument can be made for both Morocco and South Africa.
Morocco, in fact, already has two votes in its corner. Spain’s Angel Maria Villar Llona and France’s Michel Platini have announced their support for the Moroccan bid.
Both men are influential figures in European soccer and it will be interesting to see whether they can sway other European members on the FIFA executive committee.
Equally intriguing is the way the members from North and Central America and the Caribbean (CONCACAF) region will vote.
On the surface, it appears that Jack Warner, CONCACAF’s Trinidadian president, favors South Africa. He went as far as to invite former South African president Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu to address the confederation’s convention in Grenada and to visit Trinidad.
But Alan Rothenberg, former president of U.S. Soccer and the man behind the hugely successful USA ’94 World Cup, is still a powerful figure in the region, and he, along with Hank Steinbrecher, former secretary general of U.S. Soccer, has been acting as an advisor to Morocco.
Rothenberg might sway votes the North Africans’ way.
Egypt, which has not received anywhere near the media attention accorded the front-runners, still considers itself a viable candidate, and Ali el din Hilal, the country’s minister for Youth and Sport, said Friday that the outcome was far from settled.
“Some people say we have a guarantee of six ... seven votes,” he told Reuters in Cairo. “I think it’s all part of the psychological warfare. No one can be guaranteeing anything.”
Except, of course, that the May 15 vote will be contentious and controversial and will have far-reaching consequences.
Now that FIFA has painted itself into a politically correct corner by rotating the quadrennial World Cup among its six member confederations, it will be 2032 before Africa gets another chance.
Rothenberg, for one, does not think it is in the bag for South Africa simply because of the bizarre way it lost last time around.
“I think the executive committee will vote on the merits of the bid,” he told Reuters last month. “In the public’s mind there is a sympathy for South Africa. I’m not sure that, within the executive committee, that makes much difference.
“It’s a clean slate. We start all over and evaluate the bid for 2010 that makes more sense for FIFA and for football, irrespective of what happened before.
“If you want sympathy, Morocco has bid three times before. If sympathy matters, we can balance or even overcompensate. But we don’t want sympathy votes any more than South Africa does.”
There will be no sympathy at all for FIFA if, in Blatter’s supposed new era of “transparency,” there is even a hint of underhand deals or of votes being bought in the dead of night.
As an International Olympic Committee member, Blatter should be all too aware of the results of that sort of behavior.
