From supermodels to super technology, bidding for World Cup has it all
The big question for Thursday — and it will have been answered long before most Californians stumble out of bed — is this: What does it take to persuade a bunch of old and hidebound men to vote your way?
Across the globe in Zurich, 22 such men, ranging in age from 52 to 82, will decide Thursday where the men’s World Cup soccer tournaments will be played in 2018 and 2022.
Do they respond to sex appeal? Australia hopes so because it trotted out model Elle Macpherson on Wednesday to wow FIFA’s executive committee members.
When 80-year-old billionaire Frank Lowy, the Australian bid’s moneyman, introduced Macpherson he also rapidly deflated the moment.
“This is my first prize,” Lowy said while receiving a kiss from Macpherson. “The second prize will be the World Cup in 2022.”
Telling FIFA that its showcase tournament takes second place was not a politically astute move. Models come and go. The World Cup lives on.
Perhaps it is visions of a vastly different future that gets old men out of their armchairs and into a vote-casting mood. If so, Japan had exactly the right approach.
It promised Wednesday to deliver a technology so innovative that it will forever alter the way sporting events are viewed worldwide.
While Junji Ogura, Japan’s 72-year-old representative on the executive committee beamed, his fellow countrymen unveiled a plan to broadcast every 2022 World Cup game to stadiums around the world using a radical new 3D technology.
The idea would be for fans to pack stadiums around the globe to see life-size, real-time images rising in a holographic manner from screens laid flat on the stadium field, sort of like a sporting holodeck out of Star Trek. It would be (almost) like watching the real thing, with sound and all.
“The idea of this technology blows my mind,” Kohzo Tashima, the Japanese bid’s chief executive officer, told FIFA.
“This is not science fiction,” said Howard Singer, Sony’s chief executive officer. “In 2022, this will be science fact.”
Even Joseph “Sepp” Blatter, 74, had to be impressed by that. More likely though, the FIFA president and his colleagues were already thinking of ways to employ the technology and reap the financial rewards while at the same time not awarding Japan the 2022 tournament.
But who knows? Perhaps the idea of having a World Cup “played” worldwide with the massive ticket and ancillary revenue that would generate for FIFA is just the thing to turn the vote Japan’s way.
If not science fiction, then how about a different legacy? How about a World Cup in a region of the world that has never had the event? How about a World Cup whose sparkling new and architecturally innovative stadiums can be packed up after the tournament and shipped off to less fortunate countries. How about Qatar?
“A World Cup in Qatar shows it is possible to bring East and West together,” Sheikha Mozah Bint Nasser, wife of the Emir of Qatar, told FIFA.
Qatar has no qualms about spending upwards of $50 billion on making sure the first World Cup in the Middle East goes as projected. The oppressive heat? No problem. The answer is solar-powered air-conditioned stadiums and training facilities.
The small size of the country? A plus, not a minus, according to Bora Milutinovic, who has coached Mexico, Costa Rica, the U.S., Nigeria and China. “In Qatar it is not necessary to travel,” Milutinovic said. “Conditions are ideal for players to produce their best effort.”
The fourth and last of the U.S. rivals for 2022 is South Korea, which used its allotted 30 minutes of time in front of the executive committee to suggest that the World Cup’s return to the country could reunite North and South and bring peace to the peninsula.
“We saw that football has the power to bring people together, to end enmity and spur reconciliation,” Kim Hwang-sik, South Korea’s prime minister, said in reference to the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.
“It gave us a vision that the World Cup in 2022 can be a celebration of peace for Korea and the world.”
Noble sentiments, certainly, but they are unlikely to have stirred much emotion in the 22 voters. Not when Sunil Gulati, the president of U.S. Soccer, told those same voters he could deliver the best-attended, most financially lucrative World Cup of all time.
Money speaks loudly in Zurich.
So, perhaps, does a little reverse psychology. Or at least that was the card that Vladimir Putin, Russia’s prime minister, was playing Wednesday when he informed FIFA that he would not be coming to Switzerland to champion his country’s 2018 cause against rival bidders England, Spain/Portugal and the Netherlands/Belgium.
In a statement, Putin deplored the criticism that has been directed toward the FIFA executive committee and which questioned the ethics and honesty of some of its members.
“They are being smeared,” Putin said. “There is an attempt to discredit them. This seems to constitute unfair competition during the run-up to the voting. I believe such methods of competing are unacceptable.
“I respect FIFA and FIFA executive committee members and want them to be able to make the decision objectively without any pressure from the outside.”
A crafty fellow, that Putin. He plays to the ego of the 22 voters, telling them they are clean as a whistle in his eyes, but simultaneously distances himself from Zurich in case the vote goes against Russia. Wasn’t my fault.
It’s not Elle Macpherson, it’s not science fiction, it’s not a Middle East marvel, it’s not peace in our time and it’s not bags of money, but it just might work.
Thursday will tell all.
