Today's the day isn't it, might as well do a play by play thread on the subject. Ever since I found out that the Dutch are the only country out of all the bids that has told FIFA it won't comply with tax exemption rules, I pretty much knew for certain that we weren't going to get it HA! Still I'm curious to find out who's going to vote for us. Does anyone know when the first voting round is?
Yesterday proves the british public will fall for anything. What was more insane? Dave lobbying a criminal? Or the meme that only johnny foreigners bid is corrupt
I think all bids are corrupt. It's just that the Dutch-Belgian bid has less money to spend than the others hehehe. What cracks me up about the English bid is that now they're all of a sudden bigging up cultural diversity as a big plus!
As for the play by play bid, all bids have had their presentations this morning, the Dutch-Belgian bid of course ridiculed and belittled again by the English media but what else is new.
All I know is that the fellow who heads our regional FIFA group CONCAF, Jack Warner, is more corrupt than the countries bidding to host the cup. He can be bought for a song and a dance.
Okay, so it's official. Russia got WC2018 and Qatar got WC2022. Some FIFA personal got even filthier and richer. ******** FIFA.
Qatar in particular is such a joke.THey've got 50,000 people who play football there! Unbloodybelievable. I suggest we field Heracles for Qatar 2022, at least they're used to playing on artificial turf.
There's bound to be some backlash, seriously. This is going to piss off just about every big football nation no end. Football in 40 plus degrees, six 50,000 plus stadiums for a population of one and a half million. It's just too ridiculous for words.
I don't have a problem with it being awarded to Russia, but it would have been brilliant had it gone to Holland and Belgium, and I would imagine the majority of fans attending would have enjoyed that as it would have been easy to get to stadiums and plenty of bars to go to as well.
Just read the decision. It all came down to money. Russian oligarchs plus a command and control government are exactly what FIFA wanted. Qatar has petrodollars out the wazoo. I guess we will see slow motion football in 2022 unless FIFA goes to some kind of rotating substitution system where players can come in and come out. Years ago (too many), our high school had an American football game at night when the temperature was about 41 C. Periodically, we would get desert winds in September and October that can spike the temperatures up this high. It's dry heat (probably just like in the mid-East) and much less problematic than what was seen in the 1994 WC here in the US when some matches were played at 37 C and high humidity. Trouble is you really need to stay hydrated and I wonder if FIFA will permit water breaks every 10 minutes (not bloody likely). To complete the story, I didn't have any problems playing football in that heat but then American football has all kinds of breaks when you can get water.
Is there any information how much it costs the Russians and Qatari to bribe the FIFA? $ 1 million per member? Or even more?
We know that the corrupt head of CONCACAF (the North America and Caribbean) organization comes much cheaper than that!
This isn't right on so many levels, but I'm glad it won't happen in our nation. So it don't really matter. The only loser is the host -actually that is the normal citizen- but the dirty politicians and brainless idiots like Gullit don't really care about that.
I have to say I also kinda laugh at England right now. The massive ego they had and claiming "they would take football back home." And the British media being very hostile as usual to all other countries. Drawing the shortest straw in the bid haha. Good riddance. Also let's hope the world cups of 2018 and 2022 don't get any psychic animals who perfectly predict any match hype.
Am I the only one content with this decision, especially the Qatar one? Qatar has the ability and money to build these amazing (and I mean amazing) stadiums in a place of the world that's crazy about futbol. This brings back fond memories of the last time Arabs won the World Cup. In 1998