Socceroos tipped for World Cup 'success'
Soccer fans rejoice, Jose Mourinho has tipped the Socceroos to join their French counterparts in successfully progressing past the group stage in this year’s World Cup.
With Australia taking on the silky French side first up on Saturday 16 June, we’ll soon know if there’s any weight in the champion manager’s prediction.
Having twice claimed the Champions League title, there’s no doubt Mourinho knows his football, however, with Denmark and Peru the other two teams in the group, it may be a little early to put money on the Socceroos’ success.
Will you be watching the Socceroos World Cup Campaign? How far do you think they’ll progress?
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July 29 2018, 12:01am, The Sunday TimesQatar has no right to host the 2022 World Cup
Four years ago, drawing on a huge cache of leaked documents, this newspaper revealed the extent of the corruption and secret payments that secured Qatar the prize of hosting the 2022 World Cup. It was, as we described it here at the time, “the greatest sporting event ever sold”. Our revelations followed submissions to parliament in 2011 that first alleged illegal payments to secure the bid.
The bizarre decision to award the World Cup to Qatar, taken in late 2010, reflected not the best bid but the one driven by corrupt backhanders. Time has not been kind to the choice of Qatar, whose national team ranks 98th in the world and where summer temperatures reach 50C. It looked odd then and it looks as odd now. If the World Cup goes ahead in Qatar in 2022, its climate means that a traditional summer event will be shifted to November-December, putting a hole in the middle of Europe’s football season.
A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since our 2014 revelations. Two World Cups, in Brazil and Russia, have come and gone, putting Qatar next in line. Our call for the departure of Sepp Blatter as president of Fifa, football’s world governing body, was answered. Having presided over the corrupt bidding process, he was ejected from office by Fifa’s ethics committee in 2015 and banned from taking part in the organisation’s activities for eight years, later reduced to six.
Mohamed bin Hammam, Qatar’s top football official, was responsible for the payments to other football officials that helped secure the bid. He was said to be operating independently. He had been banned from all football activities for life by Fifa in 2011 for trying to buy votes when standing for its presidency.
Today, however, we have evidence of wrongdoing by the official Qatari bid in securing the World Cup. It is explicitly forbidden under Fifa rules for countries seeking to host the tournament to dump on others’ bids. Bidders, the rules say, should not make “any written or oral statements of any kind, whether adverse or otherwise, about the bids or candidatures of any other member association”.
Yet this is exactly what Qatar did in a secret “black operations” campaign designed specifically to undermine others’ bids. According to a whistleblower, the targets included England — until the Football Association decided in 2010 to focus on the 2018 event — but more particularly America and Australia.
New documents passed to this newspaper by the whistleblower show that a public relations company and former CIA agents were used to erode support for other countries’ bids. One of the conditions set by Fifa was that a successful bid should be supported domestically. Qatar recruited influential people in rival countries to speak out against those nations’ bids, thus weakening the domestic case.
The campaign went as far as planning to influence the US Congress. In a leaked email sent to Ali al-Thawadi, deputy chief executive of Qatar’s bid, a plan was outlined to compose a resolution on the harmful effects of hosting the World Cup against the alternative of financing high school sports. An academic was paid $9,000 (£6,850) to write a paper, distributed to news outlets, on the apparently huge cost to America. In Australia, as well as enlisting journalists, bloggers and high-profile figures to oppose the bid, students are said to have been recruited to appear at rugby matches with placards opposing the football World Cup.
Qatar, it is clear, fought dirty to win the hosting of the 2022 World Cup. It is not too late for Fifa to revisit this decision and relocate the competition elsewhere. Otherwise it would be easy to conclude that, while the names at the top of football’s world governing body have changed, the organisation has not. Mr Blatter may have gone but his legacy, in the form of Qatar 2022, remains.
Qatar has cheated its way to the World Cup. Cheats should not be allowed to prosper. As things stand, Qatar will do so.
