Authoritative, independent and hard hitting, the weekly column on the business of football tackles some of the biggest issues of the week. Click here to sign up for your weekly fix from the Leaders in Football.

GERRY COX: THE BIDDING WAR INTENSIFIES

5:00pm Thursday, 25th February 2010

There are nine months to go until FIFA decide who will host the 2018 and 2022 World Cup finals, and as in any gestation period, things are developing rapidly. England's bid to host 2018 appears to be progressing smoothly, having got off to a controversial start, when it was savaged by Jack Warner at last October's Leaders in Football conference.

That opening address by the FIFA power-broker and CONCACAF president certainly put a bomb under the England bid, and it has been fascinating to see how they have reacted since then. I was at Stamford Bridge over those two days in October and saw the fall-out, both in terms of the effect it had on the media, public and key people in the bid team.

Lord Triesman were genuinely shocked by the ferocity of the attack and its aftermath and Andy Anson, the bid's chief executive, was on the defensive throughout what was meant to have been a keynote speech outlining England's bid in the most positive terms. Instead he was on the back foot and had that 'rabbit-caught-in-headlights' look I hadn't seen since I was at Trent Bridge in the early 90s watching Graeme Hick facing the bowling of Curtley Ambrose and Courtney Walsh. Fast forward to Wembley this week and it was a very different man meeting the media at the launch of Morrison's sponsorship of the bid. Much more at ease, smiling and chatting with the press, Anson looked more like a number three batsmen at his flowing best than the nervous night-watchman of October.

He outlined the situation clearly, dealing with questions confidently. He played a straight bat at any googlies, left alone the loose ones, and made the most of any openings when they arose. Issues such as Jack Warner, John Terry and football's financial woes were given the forward defensive treatment, last October was left well alone, but he picked off the chance to score with the positives. And there are plenty of them. The team, which was criticised by Warner and others, has been beefed up considerably, both with world-class ambassadors such as David Beckham and world-class networkers like David Dein.

The bid book is well on its way to completion for its May deadline, finance guarantees are finally in place, lobbying is going on left, right and centre, and the majority of media and public are onside. The technical aspects of the bid, as expected, are very good, and in Anson's words 'unbelievably strong'.

FIFA want a minimum of 65,000 hotel rooms, we have 110,000 and no venue is more than three hours by train from London. We have world class stadia such as Wembley, the Emirates and the Stadium of Light, and all the stadia are sure to be packed because of the 'passion for English football.'

It is all very impressive, but of course there will be others with outstanding technical bids. He knows, and we know, that the prize is won and lost in the hearts and minds of 24 men, the Excom members who vote in early December. Thus the lobbying, which was below the line, if not invisible, before October, has intensified and broadened. Anson, Triesman and now Dein are accumulating the air miles, South Africa's President Zuma and Danny Jordaan will be guests at Wembley next week, and the charismatic David Ginola will be on his travels too.

Anson and Co will leave no stone unturned in their quest to ensure England gets the votes required, and he knows that crunch time comes in South Africa in June, long before FIFA's inspection visit in August. That is when the Excom members meet at the FIFA congress for formal discussions before the informal networking that will take place during the World Cup. That is when, more than any other time, the bid can be won or lost. So what could possibly go wrong?

Tens of thousands of England fans congregating anywhere abroad has always been a recipe for conflagration, although the situation is far better than it was in the dark days of the 80s and 90s. But there will be far more visitors from England than any other country, and the potential for trouble is a worry. But what keeps Anson awake at night is the thought of being 'out-lobbied', and of course there are some excellent operators with other bids. I saw Qatar's bid-team at close quarters in November, and I have to say how impressive it is. From bid-guru Mike Lee through to the dynamic CEO Hassan Al-Thawadi there is energy and clarity of vision, and finally that can be seen in the England bid too.

Has it arrived too late, after the storms of last autumn? Or does the FA finally have the bid and the team in place to deliver a World Cup in England?

Only time will tell.

Gerry Cox is one of England's leading football writers and former Chairman of the Football Writers' Association. He has covered well over 1000 matches including four World Cups and four European Championships. He currently runs the Hayters Sports reporting agency and writes for the Daily and Sunday Telegraph.

ROGAN TAYLOR: DOING A 'GEOFFREY'  

This week we were regaled by a chap calling for a 'boycott' of Man Utd by its growingly troubled fans. It wasn't some firebrand on a soap-box haranguing the Old Trafford faithful either; it emanated from somewhere higher up the feeding chain. No less than Keith Harris, in fact, one-time Chairman of the Football League, and current chairman of stockbrokers, Seymour Pearce.

Harris is not inexperienced at arranging football take-over's, he was involved in the purchase of Aston Villa by Randy Lerner. But this time he's leading a 'fans' buy-out' and warning the Man Utd scarf wearers that it will take more than turning up in the 'symbolic' gold and green ones to hurt the much despised American owners of the Club. Quoted in the Mail, he advised:

'The green and gold protest is fabulous....But that won't force the Glazers to sell to us. However, if enough people - and I am talking about thousands - stop turning up to matches and do not renew their tickets, then that does it. The supporters have to hurt the Glazers in their pockets.'

Any chance of a boycott like this coming together? Could 'doing a Geoffrey' do the trick?

Despite the common slang, of course it wasn't the cricketer, Geoffrey Boycott, who gave his name to this most popular activity. It was first used in 1880, with reference to the concerted efforts of the tenants of one, Captain Charles Boycott, a particularly nasty English landlord in County Mayo, Ireland, and supposedly first coined by the local priest; Father O'Mally. The 'boycott' was pretty effective too. Within a year, the Captain and his family had retreated back to the Home Counties.

Sporting boycotts have worked in the past too - perhaps most famously (and laudably) in the case of changing apartheid South Africa - but many fail, or rather they succeed in making a point but don't in reality change much. There is a precedent at Man Utd. In 1930, local taxi-driver, George Greenough - who had formed the first Man Utd Supporters' Club a few years earlier - called for a general boycott of Old Trafford, after a run of poor results. He actually did stand on a soap-box imploring the fans not to enter the ground, with some success. Only 23,000 went in for the Arsenal game and subsequent gates dropped below 10,000. But the Club bought him off and gave him a job. In 1934, we read '...Greenough has travelled extensively with the Club (where) he now holds an official post.'

The Football Association went in for boycotts too. The FA was always deeply disturbed by FIFA's very existence (for a start the French had invented it). The English boycotted the World Cups between the World Wars claiming, prior to the 1938 competition, there was a 'lack of interest amongst the populace', and notoriously never entered the World Cup until 1950. It didn't seem to make much difference to the progress of football's global governing body.

Some would argue that the lasting boycott of The Sun by Liverpool people in general has hurt the newspaper -and they say it has never recovered the lost readership, with 3.3 million copies sold nationwide, it reputedly shifts only 12,000 in Liverpool. But the paper is still a big beast roaming the jungle. The Hillsborough Justice Campaign organised a one-off boycott of an LFC away match at Sheffield Wednesday in 1998, reducing the expected travelling fans from the usual 7,000 plus, to a rump of just over a thousand. The Brighton fans' boycotts of their Chairman's 'Focus' DIY store in 2004 (and subsequently the businesses who bought space in the retail park that replaced their old ground, including ASDA) had an effect but couldn't hold back the tide.

Then you get the just plain silly ones like the Bayern Munich fans' threats to boycott the movie, 'The Day the Earth Stood Still' because it featured the cosmic destruction of their much vaunted Arena stadium in the trailer for the film. (Many of us joined them in the boycott without realising it). The Sunderland fans threatened 'Sugar Puffs' with retaliation for their sponsorship of Newcastle; and then there was the 'cappuccino war' in Italy, after Lazio's purchase of Vieri was immediately followed by rises in the local price of milk. The Roma fans thought Lazio's President (and owner of a huge food chain) was making them pay for the big striker who'd signed for their hated rivals. So they stopped drinking the milky stuff.

But asking fans not to go to games has rarely worked; it's a bit like asking opium smokers not to take the next puff. But times change and fans are much more effectively organised - and knowledgeable about the realities of the game's finances - than ever they were before. Many of them feel physically revolted by the debt based acquisitions of their clubs and the lack of empathy of their owners. And being revolted can lead to revolting.

It may even lead to joint demonstrations against their separate owners, involving both Liverpool and Man Utd fans at the Old Trafford match between the two clubs on 21st March. If that could happen in a well-organised and collegiate atmosphere, it really would be a first.

If it does, perhaps anything is possible?

Dr Rogan Taylor is the Director of the Football Industry Group at the University of Liverpool. He is also a writer and broadcaster, with five football books and numerous radio and TV contributions. He has acted as a special adviser to The FA, The Premier League and Premier League Clubs.

KEIR RADNEDGE: FIFA STEPS UP AS VIRTUAL AGENT OF CHANGE  

Internet technology is coming to football's rescue in the never-ending duel of wits between associations and agents. At one stage FIFA thought it had come up with the answer by introducing a licensing system. But most agents could not be bothered to fight their way through the administrative and financial jungle and clubs and players found it simple to bypass an impotent set of rules and regulations. Now, the answer has been revealed.

TMS is shorthand for FIFA Transfer Matching System GmbH, the subsidiary company whose web-based system will, from October 1, be the mandatory gateway though which international transfers must be affected. The happy stroke of fortune which has allowed the world's governing body to impose this methodology is the long-established and accepted need for each transfer of a player between clubs of different countries to be ratified by an international transfer certificate or ITC.

This must be passed between the federations of the two clubs before the player can pull on his new shirt and kick a ball in earnest. Now that ITC depends on the two clubs and associations ticking off the necessary technological paperwork. That further venture into the world of club football a process viewed with suspicion by more than one confederation was sparked by a task force working group on financial issues.

This was created in 2007 at the behest of FIFA Congress with a long agenda including the demand to find an alternative to the ineffective agent licensing system. As Marco Villiger, FIFA's legal affairs director, said: "We had to revise our thinking about ways to tackle the agents issue because only 20 to 30 per cent of transfers were being done by licensed agents; the vast majority were being made by agents who are not licensed . . . so we created the Transfer Matching System which is, for me, one of the most thrilling projects FIFA has ever had."

That is a major claim considering FIFA has also been responsible for matters such as creating the World Cup, administering the laws of the game, co-ordinating with the Olympic movement etc.

But agents needs not worry. This does not mean that they will go away. Quite the opposite: it secures and ratifies the role of the agent within the FIFA Family.

Welcome home!

Keir Radnedge is one of the foremost observers of international soccer. He has reported at every World Cup since 1966 and is a regular contributor to TV, radio, newspapers and magazines worldwide. He is London-based Editor of SportsFeatures.com and is chairman of the Football Commission of the International Sports Press Association (AIPS).

back