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On the face of it, Asian bidders for the 2022 World Cup were hit last week by some very bad news.
This took the form of an announcement by a top official at the Chinese Football Association that his powerhouse of a nation wants to host the 2026 World Cup.
“The CFA,” said Wei Di, its general secretary, “is preparing to ask the General Administration of Sport to bid for the 2026 World Cup”.
Now China is like the Promised Land of sport: a country of well over a billion people still not definitively ‘conquered’ by any of the big western team sports.
If such a market is keen to stage the World Cup, you might think it would be very difficult for FIFA to turn it down.
And since it is also hard to imagine the governing body of the world’s most popular - and most genuinely global – game deciding to stage consecutive editions of its flagship tournament in the same continent, China’s newly-expressed desire appears to put a serious dampener on the 2022 hopes of the four Asian bidders: Australia, Japan, South Korea and Qatar.
And a serious booster on the 2022 hopes of the United States.
(Four European bids – from Belgium/Holland, England, Russia and Spain/Portugal – are also in the running, but Europe is now thought much more likely to stage the 2018 event, even if a US win in that race is also possible.)
It will definitely be interesting to see how this Chinese story-line develops in the run-up to FIFA’s big decision in December.
After all, Frank Lowy, chairman of Football Federation Australia, actually told me last month that Australia most likely would not have bid had China decided to enter the 2022 race.
“If the Chinese were bidding we would probably not be bidding,” he said.
Having reflected on the matter for some weeks, however, (there were rumours doing the rounds in Johannesburg during the recent World Cup that just such a story was about to break) I am far from convinced that Australia and Qatar, widely seen as the most likely Asian winners in 2022, need feel too deflated.
For one thing, China needs to find a persuasive explanation as to why it didn’’t throw its hat in the ring for 2018 and 2022 at the same time as everyone else.
As Lowy’s remark to me implied, it was very much a live possibility that they would do so.
But for some reason, they didn’t; I personally wonder if a 2022 Winter Olympic bid by, say, Harbin isn’t on the cards, though that would depend on another Asian city, Pyeongchang, not winning the Games in 2018.
For another, I think FIFA needs to beware of leaving itself exposed should it buy too unconditionally into the beguiling vision conjured up by Wei Di.
Not only could it run the risk of China changing its mind - and, let’s face it, a lot can happen in 16 years – it might well also leave a situation where the US was, effectively, the only game left in town for 2022.
I just sense that FIFA decision-makers may wish to keep the competition in what has so far proved a highly competitive race for a good while yet and preferably right down to the wire.
Then there is the matter of the ageing electorate.
The vote on the 2026 host should not logically take place until late 2018.
By this time, one current member of the 24-man Executive Committee which determines World Cup hosts, will have hit 90, a further three -FIFA president Sepp Blatter himself - will be in their 80s and another nine or ten will be septuagenarians.
Even in an organisation for which the term ‘gerontocracy’ might have been coined, you have to think there is likely to be considerable change of personnel at the top table in the next few years.
Would ExCo members allow their choice of 2022 host to be coloured by a race in eight years’ time that many of them are unlikely to be around to participate actively in, at least as judge and jury?
I tend to doubt it - especially when China could just as easily host the 2030 World Cup - the centenary edition – without having any effect whatsoever on the 2022 race.
So does China’s intervention wreck the prospects of a member of the Asian confederation winning in 2022? I think not -at least not yet.
A spokesman for the Australian bid told me he was “not concerned because of existing exceptionally good relations with China”.
That does not mean that Asian candidates won’t be curious to know the outcome of Asian Football Confederation president Mohamed Bin Hammam’s current visit to China.
‘May you live in interesting times’, runs that old Chinese curse.
Asian bidders for the 2022 World Cup may this week be feeling that the times just got more interesting.
David Owen is a specialist sports journalist who worked for 20 years for the Financial Times in the United States, Canada, France and the UK. He ended his FT career as sports editor after the 2006 World Cup and is now freelancing, including covering the 2008 Beijing Olympics and 2010 World Cup. Owen’s Twitter feed can be accessed at www.twitter.com/dodo938