$45 million, Hoges, and a bouncing kangaroo weren’t enough to convince FIFA’s executive committee to host the 2022 World Cup in Australia. Australia received a grand total of one vote from the 22-person executive committee, and thus was the first eliminated.
Unlike the Olympics, FIFA rotates the tournament among its confederations. As such, it will be years before Asia has another chance to host the tournament, by which time China will surely be the logical choice.
And a damn good thing too. You’d think the 2000 Olympics – or the 2006 Commonwealth Games – would have taught us that these one-off mega-events leave a trail of bills and white elephant venues behind them – and Frank Lowy, for all his enthusiasm, was not offering to pony up the cash to build the venues. If the Qatari city-state elites want to fritter away their petroleum revenue on such folly, good luck to them. Let’s be glad we dodged that bullet.
I blame Bush.
That is all.
Yep. Glad we got out of that.
Robert Merkell, thank you for putting my thoughts down on paper.
Yes Wozza, both Bushes have a lot to answer for.
Let’s see if something turns up from Wikileaks and Assanje.
On that, just reading Assaje’s celebrated Swedish case involves nothing more than a breaking condom during consensual sex and is described as a “technicality”.
Oh, those Swedish condoms…
Wozza, which Bush? Kate Bush, the singer, or Reggie Bush, the running back for the New Orleans Saints?
—
It is rather a pity we spent $50 million of public money on this quixotic attempt to spend a few billion on stadiums that would never be used again. But thank goodness we failed.
What is rather peculiar is the idea that we were ever a chance of winning it. We are not a serious soccer nation, and the rest of the world knows it. (Yes, I know, neither is Qatar, but they’ve got a lot of money.)
… these one-off mega-events leave a trail of bills and white elephant venues behind them …
Of course they do, and it’s really annoying when interested parties and governments keep justifying them by dubious “economic benefits” and use creative accounting to say there’s no cost to the taxpayer.
But sometimes having a big public party is a significant addition to Gross National Happiness, even if it doesn’t add to GDP. “Man does not live by bread alone”, “panem et circenses” and all that. We were always going to lose, and the bid can be criticised on those pragmatic grounds, but I think it a pity actually.
Boo Robert!
I think it would have been rather excellent for Australia to host a World Cup, and fantastic for the sport. I take your point on the likely post-event stadia overload, particularly given Australia’s relatively low number of large “soccer-oriented” venues, but its also definite that this sort of event would be a massive tourism money-spinner.
Football nuts all over the world who would never have had a compelling enough reason to make the long trip to Australia before would suddenly have a reason to come.
Agree with the general sentiments above – but Qatar?
FIFA has now proved to be a corrupt joke.
Actually, DD, the game itself is beautiful, it’s just a shame its beeen priced out of our effective range.
I think the amount of spending involved on huge mega events can be a bit breathtaking also.
Wouldn’t you rather see that sort of money set aside for Haiti and the like?
Philip Noyce must be a Qatari plant. There is no other explanation for that lame promo video.
If Bush (the imbecile, not the singer, or the running back) was in fact responsible for sinking Australia’s bid, then he has done at least one productive thing in his life.
$% million dollars for what? More bread and circuses! Instead,they should have followed another practice of ancient Rome and sent us all a couple of dollars each in the mail. The economy would have been stimulated, people would have felt good and we wouldn’t have had that thieving kangaroo. My guess is he had convict ancestors.
A disgraceful waste of public money supported by ALL sides of politics.
Shame!
Qatar is mad.
The temperature is over 40 degrees when the Cup is on.
Teams will find it hard to train.
World Cups are now as much about large crowds looking at games on large screens in cities and the partying.
You cannot do either in Qatar.
There are approximately a million cheaper and fairer ways to have a big public party, dd.
Guy, it’s not a tourism money-spinner. Ask the Germans about the tightarse soccer fans who showed up in 2006; they slept in their cars and ate tinned food from Aldi.
As for “great for the sport”, I don’t see any particular reason to give soccer a leg-up over, say, the domestic footy codes, cricket, or any other sport. And the evidence – again and again – comes back to suggest that events like the Olympics (and World Cup) have SFA long-term influence on participation rates.
Are people allowed to drink alcohol in Qatar?
Yes and no. It seems that the five-star hotels sell it, but the kind of mass outdoor consumption that you’d typically see from World Cup fans is very much prohibited.
I’d go further and say that after a few weeks of watching the best athletes from Europe, Africa and Latin America play state of the art Association football, Australian fans’ palates would be very jaded indeed at the prospect of forking out good money to watch little men shuffling a round ball around in badly appointed stadia for scoreless draws in the A League.
Rob, not sure you can compare the outcomes of the German tournament necessarily with what might happen if Australia hosted; people who are in Europe regularly travel all over Europe of course to attend football matches, from club-level up. Obviously the people who would have come to Australia would not be coming via RyanAir, car, train, or bus, they would be buying fairly expensive airfares, suggestive of a crowd who did have a few bob spare to spend.
I don’t doubt that the Australian Government would get behind most bids to bring international tournaments for other sporting codes to Australia. Soccer is the most played sport in the world, and probably also the most popular spectator sport as well, so surely there is a reasonably significant tourist draw there.
Paul, you may have a point.
On the other hand, such an event just might have given the A-League the fillip it so desperately needs.
Oh, goodness me. Consulates all round the worldare going to be busy getting drunks out of Qatar gaols after that World Cup, aren’t they? Though I suppose most people will get busted at Customs trying to smuggle in tinnies.
And to add insult to injury, the same tired old cast of B-list has-beens got their snouts in the public trough.
Elle. Was she once a barrel girl on black and white TV?
Keiran. Swam at the Helsinki olympics.
That Crocodile Person. Brilliant cross-promotion for the forthcoming King Tut Mummy Exhibition. He is truly a triumph of the morticians’ art.
And a Thieving Kangaroo! What larrikinism! What cheekiness! What marsupiality! As Australian as Chips Rafferty’s boyangs. As ungovernable as Bob Menzies’ eyebrows. My Ozzie Heart swelled to breaking point.
Maybe its all part of a devious plan to disassociate the game from drunken hooliganism.
Oi! oi! oi! a win for the Oz taxpayer. Another expensive sporting ‘event’ avoided,private profit,public cost. Why don’t those deluded individuals and shrewd capitalists who think that mass spectator sport is important pay for these circuses out of their own pockets? That would stop all this nonsense.
#10 Paul Burns,
Agreed,the problem with the ‘bread and circuses’ policy is that it leads to more and more expensive circuses.
Except that they gave the 2018 tournament to Russia. I haven’t had a lot of exposure to Russians, but what little I have had revealed a seemingly infinite capacity to take alcohol on board. I still wince thinking about it.
I remember when growing up in Albany WA being perplexed by the men playing soccer. From where I came from it was a game that was played by under 10s or European migrant men. As far as I can see the only thing that has changed is that girls are now playing the “round ball game”. Soccer has been battling these kinds of stereotypes for as long as I can remember and, as far as I can tell, has had very little success in changing the bulk of the populations perception of it.
In any case, sport should be ‘played’ on the field, on tables, in the water et al and not on glass screens, much more fun.
Paul Norton, the problem you describe for (assoc) football fans post World Cup is less of a problem down here in Adelaide, where yours truly routinely takes the fifteen minute trek to Hindmarsh Stadium for mighty Reds games.
Paul, the last World Cup wasn’t exactly an advertisement for the beautiful game.
Excellent result. It was going to be annoyingly harder to ignore the silly game if we hosted the world cup.
Considering we have two other codes of football, much more popular than the variety that lets you score a goal with the hand (or head, or chest), only a fool would’ve given us the World Cup.
Not only was this a competition we wanted to lose, if we had’ve won it, everyone would’ve lost. The perfectly reasonable decision was probably helped by the Age’s plain-as-day anti-World Cup campaign (did the SMH join in on that, or was it a Melburnian thing?). For everyone of the forty-five million reasons there was for us to win, there was at least two for us to lose. And I mean in addition to those of us hoping we’d lose.
Best news I’ve heard all year.
Some of this “analysis” is as bad as the Australian final bid video – as it teh h8 for the round ball game.
This isn’t official policy any more. It was changed for this latest round of bidding – hence a bid for 2022 from the US. Others have dropped out due to mutual negotiations…
Basically what did us in is that we had no executive support – not from Blatter, Jack Warner or even our own confederation president (Bin Hamman), who supported Qatar.
Much as I hate to be part of any consensus, it’s hard to fault the general tenor of remarks above. Australia did indeed dodge a bullet, though the fact that the Australian bid came last suggests that rather than dodging a bullet, Australia was in an adjoining postcode.
It’s just a shame that:
a) $45 million was wasted
b) Somebody had to win
Qatar has guaranteed to aircondition the stadiums to no more than 27degC. If it works truckloads of equipment hundreds of planeloads of people will have to be shipped to Qatar. What is Qatar’s current CO2 footprint anyone?
Or suggestive of a crowd that had already spent a fair bit to get here and might not have much reddies left.
Let’s face it, governing bodies like FIFA, IOC, IRB etc are in it to suck as much money as possible from the tournament. That is why they demand the hosts underwrite all the downside risk and guarantee a minimum amount of income.
The last tournament had an AVERAGE ticket price of $139 ($136 for the 2006 World Cup in Germany). The hosts spend all the money on sunk infrastructure and then FIFA creams off all the income.
Better off without it.
Oh, no Robert. Where is your heart?
Where is the music that pulses through your soul after youve watched some thing beautiful,evenifonly for moments?
Would you fault Jesus for not wearing sneakers after he’d walked on the lake?
There were some exquisite moments and facinating outcomes.
Particulary for those of us who refuse Faux-pay-as-you self lobotmise and have had English Premier Leage and our National Laegue here syphoned off by the Dirty Digger.
Hooray! Strewth Bonza Mate! We don’t want that pissweak poofter game here in Australia! Can’t we have a border protection policy for this ‘silly game?’ Can’t we place all the people who want to play it or watch it on Christmas Islands or something? Anyway we are happy to watch our own game and if other countries don’t like it they can piss off. Who cares if the AFL remains Australia’s secret but without the peek-a-boo appeal?.
Why would we need border protection against soccer when soccer boosters do this to themselves?
To extend the border protection metaphor, it looks like Australia’s soccer boosters climbed aboard a self-sinking boat.
They never made it to Christmas Island!
I blame the fail-eroo.
I also blame the fail-aroo for the above error.
In spite of all the reasons given for why it would not have been good for Australia to host the 2022 World Cup (reasons with which I don’t disagree), I can’t help but be disappointed. It would have been a lot of fun to watch live some of the world’s best players, without having to pay an awful lot for travel + accommodation.
Dodged a bullet.
Anybody has any idea how we managed to spend 45mil? Even the walking with dinosaurs production cost around 7 million. Was there a gravy train? What was the biggest item of expenditure? As an accountant I just cannot digest this figure.
There is a disturbing amount of agreement on all of this. Even the boganvillea on the News Ltd blogs, by and large, think it’s good we didn’t the WC.
What Siva said!
I am agreement with ‘The World Cup is not economically good for a country to host’ argument, rather than the ‘Soccer is not a game for Australia’ argument which is basically sport xenophobia.
It seems that people that wouldn’t in a million years argue for assimilation or forcing Australia to conform to a dominant cultural paradigm go all culturally and sporing nationalistic when it comes to soccer.
Sam is right. There is a lot of disturbing amount of agreement in some of the comments. ‘One Nation’ becomes ‘One Sport’ as long as is Australian Rules football or Rugby League (depending on the state you live in).
Maybe it allows to express our latent xenophobia in a safe way. Saying that we don’t like a particular religion or belief is a no no. But with sport we can let loose by safely stating that soccer is inferior (in comparison to ‘our game’), marginalised and this ‘foreign’ game (which strangely doesn’t apply to other ‘foreign’ games such as cricket and rugby) shouldn’t be part of the mainstream of Australian sport
Siva @ 39,
Paul Hogan’s tax bill?
Jesus wept. That animated kangaroo looks like it cost about five cents to produce.
For the record, I don’t think the Government should spend 45 million dollars on any kind of sport, and certainly not League, AFL or Union. It just encourages morons.
Well as the mother of two footballers, one of whom is about to leave for college in the USA as a contracted player, I was hoping really hard that we would get this and I could dream about watching the World Cup in my own backyard with maybe a stake in the outcome *sigh*.
They are ropeable and I don’t blame them. It’s hard to teach kids that the world is fair when corruption like this rears its ugly head. I don’t envy the lot of the players having to cope with 50 degree heat either.
Still, I am sanguine about it I guess. As long as the FFA does not spend one cent more of our money propping up that Sepptic organisation with further bids!
Paul B, only a moron would assume that sporting ability only manifested with an absence of brains. That’s certainly not the case in my family and there are enough former sportsmen and women with degrees to prove my point.
Since sweeping generalisations are not your style I can only assume that snobbery is at work here which is unworthy of you.
Regardless of the merits of our bid financially and in terms of infrastructure, and regardless of the economic or social effects on Australia (good or bad), this bid deserved to fail purely on the basis of that godawful cringeworthy embarrassment of a video.
I haven’t been so ashamed to be Australian since Cronulla.
Guido: “rather than the ‘Soccer is not a game for Australia’ argument which is basically sport xenophobia.”
Not so.
A simple syllogism will suffice:
1. Soccer is not an activity fit for any human being.
2. Australia is made up of human beings.
therefore,
3. Soccer is not an activity fit for Australia.
Alexander @28, already have two football codes! You are forgetting AFL. Rugby League, Rugby Union and the third – AFL (or aerial ping-pong as it is affectionately called in the grown up states).
As you are obviously a Victorian you should hang your head in shame.
The Olympics sent NSW broke.Why would the World cup be any different? Govts should not finance private enterprise profit schemes.Why do we need to build new stadiums when people on this planet languish in hunger and lack of education? Pep up the old infrastructure and enjoy the game.
Do not underestimate the country [Qatar] that has won that right.Be fair.I don’t follow soccer at all,and with Lowy spearheading it, then a Middle Eastern country to me sounds more authentically an Australian choice.Sometimes it is better for Australians to lose out,to then ,maybe, assist with some high calibre thought and skill,thus maybe winning some export dollars.Rather than Lowy Self promotions,not accepted everywhere across Australia,because of dogged Government support.And if Australians support this[Qatar] country’s efforts now,then Australians may not have to dodge so many critics abroad unhappy with Australian Foreign Policy and Defense matters.Including the U.S.A.peoples,where from my reports sites something like 360,000 returned soldiers have mental disorders,and still do not receive first class treatment.But such numbers are used for further militarisation.And local journalist like Cynthia Banham make claims that do not make sense.Which is then like the accusations from the Australian lobbyists that they were lied to about support for the Australian bid.Really!?
$45million, how many soccerballs would that buy?
In our town the Mayor got the parking lot of the Leagues Club asphalted rather than upgrading the aging, too small and below standard library! Go figure.
@ 46 – the world isn’t fair, life isn’t fair. Better to teach your kids resiliance, self reliance, common sense and pragmatism than that the world is fair.
Yeah, Razor, because I didn’t manage to do that /snark.
They are all of the above and more but I was hoping to keep the cynicism at bay for a while longer. So shoot me.
Guido observed:
There can be little doubt that left-of-centre folk feel the insistent tugging of what may loosely be called ‘national culture’ quite as much as the rest of the populace. We tend to take some pride in both being aware that such ‘tugging’ exists and to respond to it in conscious, rational and ethcially robust ways, though one suspects that we aren’t always successful. The no man is an island … maxim is apt. This claim applies rather more generally than sport, IMO.
In my case though, I’m against governments subsidising or even giving cultural support to elite sport at the elite level, and that policy certainly applies to all sports typically regarded as “Australian” including the one sport I’m really keen on.
bmitw,
Guess its all that exposure to rugger-buggers when I was at college.
If there are benefits to tourism, national well being and sport and infrastructure resulting from the expenditure of moneys to host these sorts of games, it seems to me to make sense to cut out the intermediate step of having the games, and just spend the money directly on infrastructure, sport, tourism and a few feelgood events.
This hoo hah really sounds like a means of avoiding a business case…without even getting a major political party to make it an election promise.
I suspect that the only people who are really disadvantaged by FIFA’s decision are those who would have been on an eleven year non-stop party as the games’ promoters.
Hat tip to Sam @ 40.
Commiserations, PB. My uni days might have been a Monty Python sketch but lucky for me, not Upper Class Twit of the Year.
bmitw,
There were some corkers. Boys who went to private schools were particularly notable. One of them smashed a window with his fist because he couldn’t bash the only gay guy in the college. Another had such a temper tantrum about being knocked back by a woman that we literally had to put him in a bathtub with cold water and ice to calm him down. I could go on, but I won’t. For the most part I enjoyed my college years.
Yes, well I was more of a pranker than a prankee, Paul. Like the ghetto blaster in the economics lecture played just loud enough to reach the front of the theatre after about 20 minutes or so, but not so as to identify the source. My partners in crime were the actuarial students who were all crazy, but in a good way.
And I got my own back on the private schoolers by wearing a King’s School uniform to Conception Day for maximum points!
Bmitw writes:
They are ropeable and I don’t blame them. It’s hard to teach kids that the world is fair when corruption like this rears its ugly head.
Perhaps you should teach your kids that “corruption like this” rears its heard in the bidding for almost every sporting event that goes up for auction -be it the Olympics, the World Cup or the Commonwealth Games. And perhaps you may also want to teach your kids that Australia, despite its stated lofty ideals, is probably as bad as anyone else when it comes to using corruption as a means to further its objectives in terms of winning sporting bids. That’s not a negative reflection on Australia, that’s just the way things work. Remember all the revelations that came out about members of the Australian Olympic Committee and the “incentives” they had been giving and receiving in the lead up to the Sydney Olympics and after? It’s a bit rich of Australia to want to complain about corruption when it has wheeled and dealed in the same techniques for years
And I find it amusing that Ron Walker, Jeff Kennett’s No. 1 mate whose career flourished during the era of 1990s Liberal government in Victoria, wants to give FIFA a lesson about honesty and ethics.
bmitw – sorry about the preaching.
We are currently trying to keep Santa Claus alive for our 5 year old. The 6 yr old cousin no longer believes because she was told at school at her Mum agreed – grinch.
Murdoch’s Hun yesterday revealed that Australian soccer boosters attempted to suborn the decision of the FIFA extortionists by lavishing them with gifts and favours.
Now, said Australian soccer boosters are crying foul. The FIFA crooks took their bribes and ran!
When the relationship of trust between briber and extortionist breaks down, all that remains is the Law of the Jungle.
It’s amusing how many of the wiser heads on this thread assume that you can’t teach integrity and life skills at the same time. I can and have. But FIFA has shown by this decision that never again can it be trusted to make a decision that even pretends to put the players and spectators first and that I firmly believe will come back to bite them big time.
Wheeler-dealing only works if you can find people willing to play your game and I’d be surprised if any Australian government would pony up for more bids in the next 30 years. Other countries may feel the same way.
bmitw:
I find your objective laudable, but if it’s lessons in accountability and fairness you’re wanting to instil, looking to the major decision-making of peak internation sporting bodies is just pushing shit uphill.
The big gripe seems to be not that we are the best destination for the World Cup (that’s a laughable notion on many levels, though I’m sure we’d have a made a good fist of it), but that we wuz robbed!… Because we were “promised” votes that didn’t eventuate. WTF sort of fair and transparent process can you possibly have, when backroom shenanigens are held up as some kind of inviolable contract?
We’re a minor soccer nation, that punches as in most sports a little above our weight (but so is Qatar), and when you can only scrape together $45m in junket/godawful CGI money, you just can’t expect to buy as much fairness as Qatar can.
FDB said:
Quite right. Of course, this raises the question of why the project was considered feasible in the first place.
And apparently Qatar, on behalf of its 1.5m people, was willing to spend $USD60bn on the deal, which makes Australia’s $35.7bn on an NBN to look after 22.5m people and rising look like chump change.
Fran – I also think their plan to dismantle the stadia after the Cup and flog them off cheap to the developing world is really cute. They probably did a focus group, and realised they needed to address the filthy-rich-with-oil-money angle.
We’re a minor football nation that has been to three world cups. Qatar has been to – how many?? My sixth sense told me long ago that we wouldn’t get it – I’m just shitty that my sixth sense was right. And I hope that when 2026 is up for bids that the rest of the world tells Sepp baby to get f***ed. Since the US and UK got done as well, they just might.
almost $50 million NOT to have it here.
worth every dollar.
FDB said:
I heard they were dismantling and donating them, but yes.
Were I to anthropomorphise the biosphere, in carbon footprint terms this is like putting a knee into the biosphere’s celiac plexis. The red card should come out for this one.
“And apparently Qatar, on behalf of its 1.5m people, was willing to spend $USD60bn on the deal,’
Most of the 1.5m are foreign workers – mainly from east and south Asia and elsewhere in the Middle East (they’ll get to build the stadia). Qataris are actually in the minority in terms of overall population so the per head spend is stratospheric.
Donating is even cuter!
Aww… those cuddly sheiks, with their waist-deep carbon money.
I haven’t even got an envelope handy to calculate on the back of, but my truthy truthy gut tells me the emissions from the Qatari World Cup would approximate those from a year of BAU in Victoria.
Geoff said:
Prompted by that comment I looked Qatar up on the CIA World Factbook. In 2009 the population was given as 833,285 meaning that the per capita spend was even higher than the 40K I estimated — instead, just over $72k for every Qatari. That amounts to 59.5% of per capita GDP for that year on something that will “benefit” them for about one month.
By way of comparison, the $35.7bn for the NBN works out at $1586 per Australian, or about 4.11% of per capita GDP for something likely to be of huge value for 50-100 years.
The successful Qatari bid sets an impressive new benchmark for “white elephant”. Given that Qatar already has the higherst per capita CO2e emissions in the world (IIRC about 57tCO2e each and 3 times that of Americans) we should call this a black elephant.
It seems hard to believe they could pollute the planet any more than they already do, but they are apparently going to give it a serious try.
“It seems hard to believe they could pollute the planet any more than they already do, but they are apparently going to give it a serious try.”
.
Air-conditioned stadium when it is 49 degrees outside?
Ah, feels like oil money.
Sorry for being all dewy-eyed, but does the atmosphere really give a fiddler’s fuck about what the carbon is being burnt for?
Or is there a version that says that it’s fine if it’s a little old widder bringing up 19 kids in [name your place of choice] but NOT if it’s being used to keep a bloated capitalist little old widder suffering from cancer who seriously needs the coolth of a night (I’m not joking – there is a recent case here in Melbourne where naybours have been complaining about a little old cancerous lady running her aircon until midnight and keeping them all awake) – or (here I’d probably agree) the bloated capitalist little old merchant wanker keeping him/her/self naice…..
All I can say is, thank goodness we can now go back to watching sports we’re really good at like cricket……………………………oh dear!