Can we pull out of Fifa?

[drew]

The only way to get rid of Blatter is to vote him out. The only way to vote him out is the Executive committee. As they are mostly bent (well probably enough of them to maintain Blatters powerbase) then the national associations need to vote for different Exec members. If the people voting for them are corrupt then you need to go to a lower level. In this country I am pretty certain that, whilst the FA may at times be impotent, they are not corrupt. However, if you go to other parts of the world where corruption is part of life then the chances of getting integrity back into the process are slightly less than zero!!!

Having said that, the IOC was bent as a 10 bob note and that changed so here's living in hope. I just hope that these 'do gooder' journo's who saw fit to do what they could to scupper our bid continue to fully investigate corruption rather than just put it on the back burner until we decide to try and bid again.

 

[seagullsovergrimsby]

We should link with the USA and form the WFE.

 

[The Lemming Stomper]

First of all, I made a packet by laying England to win on Betfair. They were 8/15 at one point which I couldn't get my head round. I never thought at any point we would win this.

Quality aftertiming!

 

[drew]

Oh blah, blah, blah. FIFA are corrupt. What's new? Just because we didn't win a World Cup which we couldn't afford to run anyway and everyone's now up in arms? Its all very well leaving FIFA but then what? It'll just take us back to the 'holier than thou' attitude that has kept us out of the top of the game for the last 40 years. Sure, our club game is good but internationally we've been a laughing stock for years.

Certainly FIFA are rubbish as a governing body but, lets be honest, leaving is just going to look like sour grapes.

If we left fifa our club game would diminish. Only English players could play in our teams as any international players would be banned by fifa. Take a look at how that would affect the Albion. And let's not forget that an absence of foreign players in the prem would mean our better English players would not be playing for us. To leave Fifa would be footballing suicide.

 

[deletebeepbeepbeep]

If we left fifa our club game would diminish. Only English players could play in our teams as any international players would be banned by fifa. Take a look at how that would affect the Albion. And let's not forget that an absence of foreign players in the prem would mean our better English players would not be playing for us. To leave Fifa would be footballing suicide.

Back to grass roots then innit, jumpers for goal posts, pint pitchside, terracing, pies and bovril.

We could get rid of the FA as well.

 

[drew]

Back to grass roots then innit, jumpers for goal posts, pint pitchside, terracing, pies and bovril.

We could get rid of the FA as well.

That's not a bad idea however, I do honestly believe that you would have to make sure the jumpers were of the same size and colour just to make sure it was fair. There would also have to be an agreed way of placing the jumper on the ground. And so it begins!!!!!

 

[Iggle Piggle]

Quality aftertiming!

Ha. I see where you are coming from but I did post somewhere beforehand that I did start laying at 2/1 (well 7/4 without the margin).

I honestly thought a sensible price would be 4's, possibly even 3rd favs behind Spain who had effectively swapped votes with Qatar.

There is always plenty of money to be made on the patriotic pound. Just look at our odds at every World Cup or Euro Champsionship

 

[Scotty Mac]

we tried to play the "suck up" game with that little handbags episode, but unfortunately we failed miserably at it

as others have said, blatter seems to have it in his head that football can transform a country and that is why russia got it. what benefit would a world cup bring to england? in russia it will mean new stadiums, new infrastructure and a totally transformed country. england were never going to get it

 

[Bwian]

The good thing to come out of all of this is that England Football plc no longer has to suck up to anybody in world football. Friendlies in far flung countries during our season as a 'small favour'? f*** off you corrupt bastards. Promise our vote in exchange for future considerations? f*** off, we'll vote for whomever and whatever we feel is right.

 

[Simster]

Give it a few more years and the idea of breakaway federations will gain traction. England, Australia, Japan and so on will be the first disgruntled FAs, but eventually more will follow. FIFA are sort of doing to the World Cup what the FA did to the FA Cup, only much worse. Self interest before the good of the game and the World Cup will simply lose it's appeal. The first nail in the coffin was Blatter's moronic decision to dismiss video technology out of hand. Result: A team score a "goal" in front of a massive world audience that is nonsensically ruled out. Now they've managed to f*** up the bidding process to the extent that votes have blatently been bought and horse-traded and the best bids (certainly for 2022) have been overlooked.

I'm fairly sure there will be plenty of other ignorant decisions or examples of feeble intertia from FIFA in the next few years, to the extent that world wide interest in the World Cup will gradually be eroded. Why bother when the all important spirit of fair play has long been ignored?

 

[Scotty Mac]

The good thing to come out of all of this is that England Football plc no longer has to suck up to anybody in world football. Friendlies in far flung countries during our season as a 'small favour'? f*** off you corrupt bastards. Promise our vote in exchange for future considerations? f*** off, we'll vote for whomever and whatever we feel is right.

to be fair, im quite looking forward to thailand away

 

[Bwian]

to be fair, im quite looking forward to thailand away

So am I-but I never go for the football.

 

[Kinky Gerbil]

Give it a few more years and the idea of breakaway federations will gain traction. England, Australia, Japan and so on will be the first disgruntled FAs, but eventually more will follow. FIFA are sort of doing to the World Cup what the FA did to the FA Cup, only much worse. Self interest before the good of the game and the World Cup will simply lose it's appeal. The first nail in the coffin was Blatter's moronic decision to dismiss video technology out of hand. Result: A team score a "goal" in front of a massive world audience that is nonsensically ruled out. Now they've managed to f*** up the bidding process to the extent that votes have blatently been bought and horse-traded and the best bids (certainly for 2022) have been overlooked.

I'm fairly sure there will be plenty of other ignorant decisions or examples of feeble intertia from FIFA in the next few years, to the extent that world wide interest in the World Cup will gradually be eroded. Why bother when the all important spirit of fair play has long been ignored?

The sickening talk about fair play by twatter yesterday was ironic i assume?

 

[xenophon]

Bow down to your footballing overlords minions, all your game are belong to us!!

 

[bhaexpress]

Oh blah, blah, blah. FIFA are corrupt. What's new? Just because we didn't win a World Cup which we couldn't afford to run anyway and everyone's now up in arms? Its all very well leaving FIFA but then what? It'll just take us back to the 'holier than thou' attitude that has kept us out of the top of the game for the last 40 years. Sure, our club game is good but internationally we've been a laughing stock for years.

Certainly FIFA are rubbish as a governing body but, lets be honest, leaving is just going to look like sour grapes.

If you're talking about the standard of play well Russia's record is no better than ours and has Qatar ever made a World Cup Finals ?

 

[paddy]

If we left fifa our club game would diminish. Only English players could play in our teams as any international players would be banned by fifa. Take a look at how that would affect the Albion. And let's not forget that an absence of foreign players in the prem would mean our better English players would not be playing for us. To leave Fifa would be footballing suicide.

Only European players could play in our teams. As I think has been mentioned before, if FIFA tried to ban European players from playing in England, the European Court of Justice would simply strike it down as violating free movement principles and give them an enormous fine for being so stupid. There would even be a case for challenging any order by FIFA to European teams not to play us at an international level.

 

[The Lemming Stomper]

Ha. I see where you are coming from but I did post somewhere beforehand that I did start laying at 2/1 (well 7/4 without the margin).

I honestly thought a sensible price would be 4's, possibly even 3rd favs behind Spain who had effectively swapped votes with Qatar.

There is always plenty of money to be made on the patriotic pound. Just look at our odds at every World Cup or Euro Champsionship

I'm only jealous mate coz i missed out!

 

[alan partridge]

sorry, much as I dislike FIFA et al, we do sound like a bunch of whinging aussie...sorry, losers with all of this.

Boycotting Qatar though...bet you could get a fair few people atleast talking about that one.

 

[Simster]

If you're talking about the standard of play well Russia's record is no better than ours and has Qatar ever made a World Cup Finals ?

Sorry to be picky but I'd say it was a good deal better.

World Cup, not great - semi finalists 1966
But European, not bad at all:
Winners: 1960
Runners up: 1964, 1972, 1988
Semi Finalists, 1968. 2008

 

[keaton]

By David Conn (Guardian)

Sepp Blatter talked with customary modesty about "football giving hope to humanity and the rest of the world" before revealing Fifa's bewildering verdict: World Cups in Russia and Qatar. His 22 ageing executive committee barons – minus two suspended for breaches of ethics – had spoken, and not for England.

All that lobbying by England's football ambassadors, the inordinate amount of time the prime minister expended in that five‑star Zurich hotel while his government cut school-sport funding at home, fallen on deaf ears. Why they remained, arms folded, so unimpressed with England's wares and evident keenness, they do not have to say.

That is the first point to be made about the unaccountable, opaque inner workings of Fifa. All those millions spent by governments and football authorities around the world, amassing technical, practical proposals – including, here, from 12 local authorities facing cuts from Cameron's government, promised a fair crack at a 2018 bonanza – and Fifa delivers two words, Russia, Qatar, and no explanation.

No reasons are given then for Cameron, David Beckham and Prince William to go home with, just the whiff that too many of the 22 did not fancy 7½ years of scrutiny by England's media. A free, inquisitive media is not a noted feature of Qatari society and faces a dreadful battle to survive in Vladimir Putin's Russia, dubbed "a mafia state" in the WikiLeaks material the very day Fifa awarded the country its World Cup.

What objective elements there are to Fifa's personal schmooze of a bidding process – technical reports on stadiums and infrastructure, and accountants' reports on countries' earning potential – had England on top. Yet Russia has 2018, and Putin will now sanction billions to be spent on stadiums. Qatar, a Gulf state building a modern image through international televised sport, has already said it will dismantle the hugely expensive venues it builds, then move them after the tournament to a place where they may have a viable afterlife.

Such was the decision Fifa made today, and feedback is another modern business practice to which world football's governing body does not apparently subscribe. Yet those were the rules of engagement when the FA decided to bid with the bounding support, first, of Labour, then the Conservative-led coalition government, for whom Cameron made Blatter one of his first calls as soon as he had access to the Downing Street phone. There was always a sense of eager naivete around the England bid, from themanifold problems cobbling together a harmonious board given the dismal hostilities between the Premier League and FA, to what the bid really faced at Fifa.

With so many in the football public apparently directing righteous anger at the BBC it seems awfully sad that our free press, still supporting investigative work on the rich and powerful, is not a source of pride. The Sunday Times had Amos Adamu, the Nigerian executive committee member, asking undercover reporters he had never met before for US$800,000 personally, to build artificial pitches. He and Reynald Temarii of Oceania were suspended from voting after that sting. Then the BBC's Panorama programme alleged, based on an internal document it had obtained, that three members of the executive committee, which has since voted for Russia and Qatar, had taken advantage of their positions to bank huge bribes.

That was, of course, a difficult moment for England's bid, but an attack on the BBC was not an adequate response to the seriousness of the allegations. The reaction, in an official statement which therefore carried the sanction of board members including Lord Coe, sometime chair of Fifa's ethics committee, that Panorama should be considered "an embarrassment to the BBC" will be very difficult to justify in the grey dawn of defeat.

It also, unfortunately, undermines the ability of the bid team, in the government, football authority and parliamentary select-committee inquests which are sure to follow, to talk about the defects in the world game's governing body, and in the bidding process, which they now understand better than anybody. The immediate complaints of the ashen chief executive, Andy Anson, alleging collusion between 2018 and 2022 bidders, after a year of apparently hearing and seeing no evil, sounded hollow.

It is the cleanest of ironies that Cameron's toadying press conference at Downing Street with Blatter last month followed one in which the prime minister committed himself to complete transparency in government. His avoidance of the alleged corruption question did us, in the end, no favours anyway.

And so, having chanted the merits of the English game abroad, our football ambassadors fly back – to an FA without a permanent chairman, beaten up endlessly by the Premier League, its clubs owned by an increasingly curious mix of overseas interests, and a national team on its knees. Beckham, England's proudest football icon, will go home to his lavish earnings in LA. And Cameron can return to urgent government business – of cutting funding for school sport and slashing the budgets of local-authority leisure departments, having failed to land the big event which would have dazzled us all.