By Andrew Warshaw
February 17 – Next week’s pivotal meeting over when to stage the 2022 World Cup has been put back 24 hours – but the outcome looks set to be the same. FIFA have confirmed that its 2022 multi-stakeholder Task Force will now convene on Tuesday instead of Monday – in the Qatari capital of Doha – to recommend precise dates.
A final ruling can only be taken by FIFA’s executive committee which next meets on March 20. But next week’s session should go a long way towards ending years of procrastination.
Whilst holding the tournament in winter is already a done deal according to joint Task Force chairman and Asian football supremo Sheikh Salman Ebrahim bin Khalifa of Bahrain (the only issue is January/February or November/December), not everyone willingly accepts that.
The European Club Association, which will be represented in Doha by general secretary Michele Centerano and vice-chairman Umberto Gandini, and the European Professional Football Leagues will make one last-ditch joint effort to promote May as a viable alternative since it is closer to the traditional World Cup slot.
They will make the point that the vast majority of players lining up at the World Cup play their club football in Europe yet privately they concede that they will probably not have a powerful enough voice – especially without UEFA as a confederation behind them.
Both the ECA and EPLF fail to comprehend why next week’s meeting has been scheduled for Qatar when previous sessions were at FIFA headquarters in Zurich. FIFA have said it is so that the various stakeholders can gauge conditions in the Gulf state but that doesn’t wash with the clubs and leagues.
“There is no reason for us to go to Qatar for this apart from a political one,” one ECA source told Insideworldfootball. “If it’s about testing conditions, they should first be looking at conditions in May which are far more important than the ones in February.”
One explanation could be that the 2022 local organising committee are staging their first ever board meeting at the same time, making the travel logistics simpler for the likes of FIFA general secretary Jerome Valcke.
“We still would like to have a clear understanding as to why our (May) proposal has not been discussed,” said the afore-mentioned source. “We may not be on the same wavelength as other stakeholders but the problem will be the international calendar when it comes to squeezing games.”
The irony, of course, is that some of those games – Champions League and Europa League fixtures – are controlled by UEFA which is in turn controlled by Michel Platini.
Why is this ironic? Because Platini not only voted for Qatar to stage 2022 but did so on the basis that the tournament would be held in winter, potentially throwing the scheduling of his very own club competitions into chaos.
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