Major Events

Hosting the World Cup is like a bad divorce and FIFA’s lawyers are better than yours. After the fun you’re left with the costs and a sour relationship.

Never mind the demands in the lead up, even during the event you realise that something is wrong. Construction activities have to stop for a month. The construction site has to be beautified. There is no compensation for the companies and the workers.

Worse still, you have to drink Budweiser. No more VB. Budweiser paid all those millions in sponsorship and FIFA requires that no Australian beers are drunk in areas associated with the event. There too, you are required to eat McDonald’s burgers. McDonald’s is also a sponsor and it is an offence to sell local in the same areas.

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In the increasingly likely scenario that Australia fails to secure the necessary votes to stage the 2022 FIFA World Cup, soccer in this country will be booted back to sport’s second tier with the thundering force of a John Aloisi penalty.

That’s no doomsday scenario. It’s reality as cold as the snow currently blanketing Zurich, where the bid announcement takes place at 2am eastern standard time tomorrow morning.

In many simple, reassuring ways, it’ll be business as usual for soccer if our bid fails. The half million registered soccer players will still rock up at training. The A-League will probably still exist. And Australians will still go mad for the FIFA World Cup every four years, and to a lesser extent the Asian Cup and other Socceroos matches of consequence. But soccer won’t come close to displacing the oval ball codes in terms of mass popularity for a generation or more. If ever.

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