For Australia, Ben Buckley spoke about a “No Worries World Cup”.
Alexei Sorokin said Russia would be ready to show “the new country” it had become.
But, for my money, much the most interesting presentation of the three World Cup bidders that spoke at this week’s International Football Arena was that given by Yuuichiro Nakajima of Japan, the only one of the trio, by my judgment, with little chance of winning.
Bid executive director Nakajima’s theme was technology and what he said set my mind racing in all sorts of unaccustomed directions.
The specific application he spent much of his address talking about was something called Full Court 3D Vision.
I’m no techie, but as I now understand it, this is a process whereby the action of footballers as they play on the pitch is captured by 200 mini cameras and 70 mini microphones.
By some mysterious electronic alchemy, this data is then used to generate 3D images and to project them vertically upwards from a screen lying flat on the ground.
This screen could be the size of a full-scale football pitch, or it could be smaller.
Either way, spectators would be able to view the action as they were standing or sitting around the screen, ie from exactly the sort of vantage-point they would experience if they were in the stadium watching the match live.
Now I have not seen this technology in action.
I cannot speak about the quality of the images generated today, let alone in 12 years’ time, which is when Japan is hoping to stage the World Cup competition.
What I can do is begin to imagine the consequences if the impression created is remotely realistic.
At a minimum, it would completely transform World Cup fan-zones - and indeed, Japan is promising to install the technology at a staggering 400 such zones around the world.
But think for a moment: what if these full-sized screens could be laid – temporarily – on top of existing football pitches and used to produce a tolerably realistic and near instantaneous 3D facsimile of the real action thousands of miles away?
Well it is not much of a stretch to imagine 80,000 England fans showing up at Wembley to watch a full-scale 3D projection of England’s World Cup match against, say, Brazil in, say, Yokohama, while, across the Atlantic and for the self-same reason, a similar number of Brazilians is packing out the Maracana.
Indeed, a game of that stature could draw tens of thousands of fans to stadia in nearly any country on earth.
In no time, commercial revenues from such 3D extravaganzas could dwarf those generated by the real thing.
Think a bit more: If that happened, you could imagine the prime concern of FIFA and other stakeholders quickly becoming the quality of the customer experience at these hundreds of virtual venues.
And, if that happened, the most important criterion in choosing where the real match actually took place might, in turn, become the ability of the venue to capture the most realistic 3D images.
Take the logic one step further and, it seems to me, the vexed issue of where each World Cup is actually played becomes an irrelevance because fans will be able to go to familiar stadia in just about every country in the world and experience virtual copies of every game.
Quite what the mainstream broadcasters who provide so much of FIFA’s money at present will make of this, I shudder to think.
But it could spell the end of the sort of high-octane bidding contests for hosting rights that we are currently witnessing.
As a journalist, I think that would be a shame.
But, given recent developments, I can see how the prospect might hold a certain appeal at Schloss FIFA.
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