By Paul Nicholson
June 8 – Alexei Sorokin, head of the organising committee for the Russia 2018 World Cup, has expressed frustration at having to repeat that the Russian bid was clean and transparent. Sorokin will speak again later this week at the World Football Forum in Moscow where he will outline progress in the preparations for 2018.
With the US turning up the pressure on FIFA saying that it is expanding its remit beyond the criminal investigation into corrupt officials regarding the award of marketing rights, the focus has quickly fallen on to the 2018 and 2022 World Cup awards. Following the referral by FIFA of its ethics report in the award of 2018 and 2022 to the Swiss authorities, the Swiss seized documents and data from FIFA House in Zurich as part of its investigation. The US federal authorities subsequently said that they too were turning their attention to the bids but have released no further details.
Meanwhile FIFA is meeting the local Russian organisers this week in Samara to review progress and preparations for 2018 World Cup as one of the regularly scheduled project meetings.
Talk of investigations, boycotts and stripping of hosting rights are a distraction for the Russians. While they appear to be part of wider ‘soft’ geo-political warfare from the US and the West (England in particular) towards Russia, they have taken attention away from 2018 activity in Russia, with the draw for the qualification groups taking place in St Petersburg this July.
“We are getting close to being exhausted about having to repeatedly stress our bid was clean, our bid was transparent, it was done in accordance with all the practices that are in place with FIFA. With the underground investigation done by Mr Garcia and his colleagues at the request of FIFA we submitted all the documents and don’t know what else we could do about this investigation. We have been completely exonerated by this investigation,” said Sorokin.
Interviewed by the BBC’s Hard Talk programme, Sorokin went on to say: “It is true that England were our rivals but we won so I think some people should learn to lose with dignity.”
Since the announcement by FIFA president Sepp Blatter that he would hand on his presidential mandate at an extraordinary congress to be held sometime between December and March next year, there has been a cacophony of calls from England starting with FA chairman Greg Dyke to look into the bids and root out the “wrong ‘uns”, and continued in the UK parliament with sports minister John Whittingdale saying England was ready to host 2018 and/or 2022 (he has previously advocated a withdrawal from FIFA entirely). Even London’s mercurial mayor Boris Johnson joined in saying London was ready to host.
English FA general secretary Martin Glenn had a different viewpoint to his country’s politicians. “We are really not interested,” he said. “It has gone to Russia in good faith, they have not had a World Cup, why shouldn’t they play there? And 2022 was never going to be in Europe so it should be outside of Europe. So we support the World Cup being dispersed around the world, as the name suggests.”
Talking about the strength of the World Cup and the global opportunity it provides, Sorokin said: “Instead of developing it together and make a better product some people are trying to diminish its importance in the world by trying to take it somewhere else etc. We are deep in the process of preparing, we have already started spending with a lot of money, we are well on track with our preparations.”
Contact the writer of this story at paul.nicholson@insideworldfootball