October 29 – England’s Football Association is to consult its lawyers after suspended FIFA president Sepp Blatter’s remarkable disclosure that there was a fixed agreement for the 2018 World Cup to go to Russia even before the vote took place.
The FA spent £21million on England’s 2018 failed bid and its chairman Greg Dyke says it would be “very nice” to get that money back.
Blatter told Russian news agency TASS that the tournament was always slated to go to Russia with the 2022 World Cup to be held in the USA – until UEFA president Michel Platini changed the course of events by throwing his weight behind Qatar.
Dyke, giving evidence to a group of parliamentarians representing the culture, media and sport committee, said: “We will look into detail at what Mr Blatter says. If he is saying ‘we wanted Russia’ and it looks like he wanted that fixed before the vote, it’s suggesting that it was all fixed anyway.”
Dyke was also quizzed by MPs over the FA’s initial backing for Platini to become FIFA president before the Frenchman was provisionally banned pending an ethics committee hearing into the SFr2 million payment for work carried out nine years previously.
UEFA recently held a session of its top brass to discuss the crisis and that’s when, according to Dyke, the FA’s position on Platini changed.
“That there was no contract, or a verbal contract 10 years later seems to me unrealistic,” said Dyke. “We were told initially there was a contract, we then discovered at that UEFA meeting there was no [written] contract.”
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