England 2018 should not have spent so much money on bid claims London Mayor advisor

By Tom Degun at City Hall in London

April 14 – Costs on England’s disastrous bid to host the 2018 World Cup should have been kept much tighter, one of London Mayor Boris Johnson’s closest advisors has claimed.

The bid cost the Football Association an estimated £15 million ($24 million) with Councils aiming to host World Cup matches stumping up over £2.1 million ($3.4 million) but the England 2018 bid team, led by chief executive Andy Anson, suffered a humiliating defeat at they went out in the first round of voting after gaining just two votes from the 22-man FIFA Executive Committee, one of which came from Englishman Geoff Thompson.

Russia went on to secure the right to host the 2018 competition and Neale Coleman, Johnson’s advisor on the World Cup bid and a senior Board Member at the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA), told the London Assembly at a special hearing that the costs of the embarrassing failure should not have been so high in a difficult economic climate.

“In hindsight we could have been a lot tighter on the 2018 World Cup bid had we more scrupulously gone through what we were spending and exactly how it was being spent,” said Coleman, the Director of the London 2012 Coordination at the Greater London Authority (GLA).

“But I also think that when there is such a big prize at stake, certain risks do have to be made and large sums of money do have to be spent.

“It is no secret that when the FIFA inspection team came to England to look at the stadiums, they stayed at the Dorchester Hotel and had dinner with Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg but this is not out of the ordinary when it comes to bidding for major events.

“I know that all of England’s competitors for the 2018 World Cup were also putting the FIFA inspection teams in the best hotels and taking them out to dinner with heads of state so what the England 2018 bid team did was not unusual.

“It was left to the England 2018 bid team to organise the FIFA inspection visit but what they did was very similar to what the London 2012 bid team did when the IOC (international Olympic Committee) Evaluation Commission came to inspect the bid [in 2005] and they obviously won the bid.

“It has become common practice to do this with both FIFA and the IOC because of the enormous prize on offer.

“But the England 2018 bid team also thought they were in a better position with FIFA than they actually were and were made a number of false promises.”

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