Australia Big Loser in World Cup 2022 Bid

[londoncabby]

FIFA decide fan cannot afford to pay A$ high expense , 50% tax, 10% GST, expensive hotel, transport, etc. etc.

http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2010/s3083554.htm

Australia loses bid to host 2022 World Cup


TONY EASTLEY: Members of Australia's World Cup bid team were putting on very brave faces after Australia's hopes of hosting the 2022 Games were dashed overnight.

After three years of intensive lobbying and $45 million spent pursuing the dream, the Australian delegation went from hope to bitter disappointment when FIFA declared that the Arab oil rich nation of Qatar would be the host country for 2022.

As it was Australia was never in the running. It was knocked out in the first round of voting having secured just one of the possible 22 votes. It was a miserable outcome for the Australian delegation in Zurich.

From there Europe correspondent Emma Alberici filed this report.

EMMA ALBERICI: For Australian Football Federation chairman Frank Lowy it's a particularly devastating result.

FRANK LOWY: Australia, what can I say. I can only say that I am bitterly disappointed - disappointed for you that we couldn't deliver the 2022 World Cup.

EMMA ALBERICI: FIFA's rotation system means Australia won't be eligible to bid again for 2026 so will have to wait at least until 2030 for another tilt at what is the biggest event in the world.

By then, Frank Lowy will be 100-years-old.

FRANK LOWY: We have done our best. I know that we could not have done anything better. The bid was very credible and the behaviour of our team was fantastic. I am proud of that but I would have liked to have delivered a 2022 World Cup.

EMMA ALBERICI: Qatar presented a bid full of emotion, imploring the executive committee to make history by sending the World Cup to the Middle East for the first time.

Chief executive of the winning bid, Hassan al-Thawadi told a packed auditorium that awarding the World Cup to his country proved that the region was not the inhospitable place many suggest it is.

HASSAN AL-THAWADI: Bringing the World Cup to the Middle East now and FIFA's momentous decision today will showcase the world that the Middle East is home to a lot of people, it is opening its arms to the rest of the world and in doing so, such misconceptions will be dissolved.

 

[londoncabby]

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/new...cup-bid-was-lost/story-fn76vhk4-1225965439906

FRANK Lowy realised things had gone wrong when he entered the auditorium for the 2022 World Cup announcement and a few "friends" avoided his eyes.

The fate of his three-year campaign to bring the World Cup to Australia was still supposed to be a secret hidden in an envelope held by an independent auditor and a Swiss notary.

"When I walked into the room, I passed some executive committee members, and we had some friends there and I looked at them and they didn't look properly back and I knew we were gone," Lowy said later. The victory for Qatar over Australia and three other bidders was at that time being leaked on the Qatari television network al-Jazeera, but the men who avoided the gaze of the 80-year-old Australian did not need to get the news from any TV.

Several "friends" of Lowy on FIFA's executive committee had broken their promises to vote for Australia, and the result was not just defeat but humiliation for Australia's richest man.

Start of sidebar. Skip to end of sidebar.
Related Coverage

* Australia's World Cup heartache Adelaide Now, 1 day ago
* Australia's World Cup dreams dashed The Daily Telegraph, 1 day ago
* World Cup bid presentations Adelaide Now, 1 day ago
* 'No worries' for Aussie 2022 bid Courier Mail, 1 day ago
* Lowy's the man for a prize fight Adelaide Now, 2 days ago

End of sidebar. Return to start of sidebar.

After three years' work by Lowy and his team, backed by $46 million of Australian taxpayers' money, the bid had collected an embarrassing total of just one vote from the 22 members of FIFA's all-powerful executive committee.

That made it the first country eliminated from the contest, outshone even by South Korea, a 40-1 outsider that based its campaign on an unappealing invitation to soccer chiefs to embroil themselves in the campaign for reunification with North Korea but which still managed to gain four votes in the first round of voting.

When FIFA chief Sepp Blatter confirmed Lowy's hunch by opening his envelope to reveal that the world's most-watched sports tournament would be held in a desert outpost with just 1.5 million people and a climate that makes outdoor sport potentially lethal, the Australians retreated to a sideroom to console themselves in a session that showed much about the remarkable role Lowy has played in this bid.

"There were lot of tears, and we all felt like shit," was how one member of the team put it, but many of the Australians, from Governor-General Quentin Bryce to junior staffers, thought first of consoling the shopping centre tycoon.

Socceroos captain Lucas Neill said they all knew "Frank is hurting."

"He put so much time and effort and passion and energy into this, and I think honestly this has been his driving force for some years now.

"He has been like a dog with a bone, all he has wanted to do is take Australia to another level, the biggest level he could take it to is to host a World Cup.

"He has got us to two World Cups (and) this would have been a great achievement for him and reward for his efforts during seven years as head of the Football Federation of Australia."

"Everybody was very supportive of me," Lowy said when he emerged to front reporters a few minutes later.

"They kind of came up to me to shake my hand, give me a hug and a kiss. It is very nice that we have such a camaraderie among ourselves because it is easy to be on top when you win.

"When you need it most is when you are not winning, and I certainly had that from my colleagues. Everybody around us and people who are not even with us - they knew how much we wanted it, they knew how hard we worked, so I got a lot of sympathy.

"And it feels good that there are some people understanding, you know?"

If the bid team did not already understand how much the campaign meant to Lowy, any doubts they had were erased at a private dinner he held for them at their swish Zurich hotel, the Dolder Grand, two nights earlier.

With about 20 people sitting down to a final meal together, Lowy rose and told them how much football and the 2022 bid meant to him.

From his childhood in war-time Hungary to his spells as a refugee in detention camps in Cyprus and Palestine, it was playing football that gave him a sense of belonging, he told them, and it helped him to make his first friends in Australia when he arrived there as a 21-year-old.

Nobody needed to be told how much Lowy and his family - worth more than $5 billion - have flourished in his new homeland, and helping to win the 2022 World Cup would be a wonderful legacy, even though he admitted that he did not expect to be alive to see it.

"There wasn't a dry eye in the place," said one of the diners. "Even the hard nuts were choked up listening to the boss telling us what this was all really about for him."

Few Cup bids have relied so heavily on one man, as Lowy has personally lobbied every voting FIFA member, entertaining many on his own yacht, and his rags-to-riches life story was used in Australia's final presentation this week. But the man who has negotiated so many business deals and can afford to buy almost anything he wants could not pull this one off.

Facing up to yesterday's failure was made harder by the fact that Lowy and his team had so obviously misjudged the contest, as they genuinely believed they would get at least four votes in the first round and that they then had a serious chance of going on to pick up support from eliminated candidates and winning the contest.

"I did think that we had support, and I did think that we had a fair chance," Lowy admitted. "It was harder than I thought it would be. I was expecting to be smiling here today and giving a press conference for a winner."

Buckley refused to talk of lies and broken promises but said "we were certainly of the understanding that we had significantly more support than that."

In fact, the only committee member who did vote for Australia was probably Franz Beckenbauer, the German football legend who once called the Australian bid perfect.

That dismal result, and the insistence yesterday by Lowy, Buckley and federal sports minister Mark Arbib that the team had done everything possible, suggested it should never have been in the contest in the first place.

The Australians are adamant the European football consultants they hired for millions of dollars gave them excellent advice about FIFA's inner workings but better advice would have been to stay home because FIFA does not make decisions based on the technical and sporting merits of each bid but on a form of politics and back-scratching in which Lowy and his team were horribly out of their depth.

The Spanish-Portuguese bid for 2018 and the Qatar 2022 bid clearly breached the rules of the contest by swapping votes. Other votes were bought with old debts and new promises.

The evaluation reports that said Australia and the US in 2022 and England in 2018 had the best-credentialed bids turned out to

be a joke. When FIFA's powerbrokers had the privacy of a secret ballot, they chose the two bids with the worst assessments - Russia for 2018, Qatar for 2022.

Part of Australia's problem was a lack of a natural support base, as it has not yet been embraced as a genuine member of the Asian confederation.

It may have been an attempt to build such friendships for the future that led Lowy to order his disappointed team to suck up their pain and avoid any public complaints about Qatar and the obvious flaws in FIFA and its selections system.

Others were not so restrained.

England bid member Sebastian Coe said FIFA needed to change its voting procedure.

"FIFA will have to look at what they've presided over the last few weeks and month and decide if this is the way they want to continue in the bidding process," he said

Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, said the days of the FIFA selection process "are now numbered in its current form."

"If one of the results of what has happened today is that we proceed to a closer examination of how these decisions are taken, at how World Cups that are worth billions of pounds are awarded around the world, I don't think that would be a bad thing," Johnson said.

 

[xenomorph]

With about 20 people sitting down to a final meal together, Lowy rose and told them how much football and the 2022 bid meant to him.

From his childhood in war-time Hungary to his spells as a refugee in detention camps in Cyprus and Palestine, it was playing football that gave him a sense of belonging, he told them, and it helped him to make his first friends in Australia when he arrived there as a 21-year-old.

Nobody needed to be told how much Lowy and his family - worth more than $5 billion - have flourished in his new homeland, and helping to win the 2022 World Cup would be a wonderful legacy, even though he admitted that he did not expect to be alive to see it.

"There wasn't a dry eye in the place," said one of the diners. "Even the hard nuts were choked up listening to the boss telling us what this was all really about for him."

Few Cup bids have relied so heavily on one man, as Lowy has personally lobbied every voting FIFA member, entertaining many on his own yacht, and his rags-to-riches life story was used in Australia's final presentation this week. But the man who has negotiated so many business deals and can afford to buy almost anything he wants could not pull this one off.


(response: wow, what a powerful story for an australian refugee.)


The Australians are adamant the European football consultants they hired for millions of dollars gave them excellent advice about FIFA's inner workings but better advice would have been to stay home because FIFA does not make decisions based on the technical and sporting merits of each bid but on a form of politics and back-scratching in which Lowy and his team were horribly out of their depth.


(response: at least the aussies play fair, and we do not need to re-schedule the footy games around soccer.)

 

[david]

Australia deserves to host the world cup more than an Arab country. Sad. Those arabs must have bribe FIFA.

 

[micheldell]

Australia's World Cup bid team has been delayed after the bid to host the 2022 Olympic Games in Australia overnight dashed hopes very brave face. After three years of intensive lobbying and spent $ 45,000,000 to pursue the dream, the Australian delegation to the time from hope to despair, FIFA announced that the Arab oil-rich Qatar will host in 2022.