One of the qualities that have underpinned Sepp Blatter’s long career in sports administration/politics is his bouncebackability. This was on display again in Monaco last week.
On Day One of the International Olympic Committee (IOC)’s 127th Session (December 8), the FIFA President shrugged off a potentially humiliating reverse over age limits, and by extension getting his own term as a full IOC member extended, with a resonant phrase: “I’m a team player.”
He then attended a glittering ceremony at which the Olympic Golden Rings awards for outstanding broadcast coverage of the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics were presented before returning on Day Two and crafting a response that appeared to shed new light on the emerging poker game over the 2022 sporting calendar.
FIFA’s continued failure to nail down the dates between which that year’s World Cup in Qatar will be played has thrown sports planning for the start of the decade into disarray. I think August is the only month I have not heard proposed at one time or another as a potential time-slot for the competition.
With sport such big business nowadays, the utter uncertainty of the timing of such a massive event threatens major repercussions in the broadcasting and sponsorship markets.
The IOC too is an interested party in the situation arising from FIFA’s dithering: its second-biggest event – the Winter Olympics – falls in 2022. The traditional time-slot, dictated largely by climate, is January and, more particularly, February.
By most yardsticks, the Winter Olympics is Big Potatoes; in a few, frequently snowbound, countries – Canada, Norway, Russia, perhaps Switzerland and Austria – there is little if anything bigger.
In most of the world though – and you can perhaps, post-Brazil 2014, even include the increasingly soccer-struck USA in this category – the Winter Games comes a definite second to a World Cup in which your national team is playing.
If there were a direct clash between the two mega-events, motivated by a desire to avoid Qatar’s blistering summer heat, the World Cup would suffer – and sponsors who back both find it difficult to get maximum bang for their marketing buck – but the Winter Olympics would suffer a lot more.
The Winter Olympics plainly cannot do without snow. So you would think it very important, given that the 2022 Games (for the 24th time out of 24) are to take place in the northern hemisphere, for the IOC to keep FIFA out of this January/February time-slot.
Until quite recently, this appeared not to be at issue: Blatter promised in November 2013 that: “We will not play the World Cup in January and February.”
He went on: “It would be totally disrespectful to the Olympic family and organisation when they have the Winter Olympic Games in January and February.”
Since then, however, January/February was one of three possible time frames discussed by the Task Force set up to decide when to stage the competition, along with June/July and November/December.
If that really is the size of it (and I am personally not yet convinced things have even progressed that far), I can think of two reasons why January/February may appeal: a) it would probably be less disruptive to the European leagues, where most money in the game is concentrated and where most of the biggest stars play, since it would coincide, in part, with the midwinter break; b) it would, in effect, shorten FIFA’s traditional four-year cycle, potentially accelerating by a few months payment of the last tranche of World Cup-related rights fees by broadcasting/marketing and ticketing/hospitality partners.
Taking all that into account, I took the opportunity in Monaco of asking Blatter face-to-face, one-on-one, mano a mano, whether January/February was now definitely out of the question. His answer, delivered after a short pause with that Blatterish twinkle in his eye we have come to recognise, was, I felt, quite revealing.
“Definitely I, as an International Olympic Committee member, would be against holding the World Cup at the same time as the Winter Olympics,” the FIFA President told me. “That is a fact.”
My interpretation – bearing in mind that he could just have said, “Yes, January/February is definitely out of the question” – was that he was implying that, if a January/February World Cup was what colleagues in football wanted, he, though personally opposed, might be powerless to prevent it.
To me, the reply is pure Blatter: he retains full deniability, since he can say that a hare-brained journalist, out for a story, has misinterpreted his remark. Yet, if I am right, he got a message across.
When I tried to test my theory later on a senior IOC insider, his inference was the same as mine.
Apparently, then, though it would be melodramatic to assert that we are on collision course, the risk of a collision, at least, has not yet been fully averted.
And since the IOC and FIFA are two proud bodies of people, for whom blinking would be tantamount to an acknowledgement that their particular event might not be the biggest thing in sport in 2022, things could, I think, get very tense.
Much as he loves football, which has an important place on the Summer Olympic programme, I am pretty sure that IOC President Thomas Bach’s first instinct would be to fight for the Winter Games’s traditional window. He took a strong line in a recent BBC interview, observing that it was “very difficult to move snow to July” and going on: “Our dates, they are clear. We are committed also to the future organiser and the Winter Games in particular you need to adapt to the weather conditions in a country, so there is no real room to manoeuvre.”
Indeed I wonder if the choice of International Skiing Federation (FIS) President Gian-Franco Kasper as the first beneficiary of the IOC’s more flexible age-limit rules, from which Blatter and other IOC veterans were excluded, was not some sort of subtle message.
If push does come to shove, though, just as Blatter ultimately backed away from confrontation on the age-limit issue, I wonder whether the IOC wouldn’t be well-advised to show enough flexibility to avoid a direct date clash, rather than risk playing Joe Frazier to FIFA’s Muhammad Ali.
Indeed, I wonder whether one of just two remaining candidates for the hosting rights to the 2022 Winter Games couldn’t exploit the situation to do both itself, and potentially the IOC, a favour.
At present, the Kazakh city of Almaty is seen, I think it is fair to say, as very much second-favourite in a two-horse race. It is up against Beijing, capital of the most populous country on earth, which, if it wins, would become the first city in history to host both Summer and Winter Games. With less than eight months to go before a decision is taken (in tropical Kuala Lumpur!), Almaty’s prospects of winning seem to me remote.
Electoral candidates in this sort of position tend to have little to lose by taking risks. If they can catch the eye, they might build some much-needed momentum; if the gambit fails, they are no worse off than when they started.
If I were Almaty, then, I think I would be giving careful consideration to letting it be known that the city is quite prepared to let the Games drift on into March. I don’t know the area, but temperature/precipitation charts seem to suggest that the climate could accommodate this. You wouldn’t want too much slippage, though, because good conditions are also required for the Winter Paralympics.
Such a sequence, with one sporting mega-event following hard on the heels of another, would be far from ideal. The World Cup would coincide, presumably, with the Olympic torch relay. But it would be much better than an out-and-out clash, particularly for the IOC.
And from Kazakhstan’s viewpoint, such an initiative just might get the sports world talking about its bid, ahead of the submission of candidature files next month, in a way and to an extent that so far has not really happened.
David Owen 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, the 2010 World Cup and London 2012. Owen’s Twitter feed can be accessed at www.twitter.com/dodo938.