In case you missed it, England failed in their bid to host the 2018 football World Cup, a result that brought about reactions that ranged from balanced, to restrained criticism of the process, through to the frankly ridiculous. Having spent £15m on acquiring just one vote from other countries' representatives (oddly, from Issa Hayatou, one of the "Panorama Three"), England's bid chief Andy Anson began to deflect blame for the failure onto pretty much everyone but himself. He said that FIFA members had reneged on promises to vote for the England bid (how dare they!) and had given him the reasons for the bid's failure: "I'll caveat this by saying this is not our excuse at all. But they are saying to us that our media killed us" he said, making it sound suspiciously like an excuse after all.
FIFA president Sepp Blatter's response to the predictable accusations of corruption within his organisation is to portray England as bad losers, rubbing salt into the wound by adding "England, of all people, the motherland of fair-play ideas". Irrespective of the accuracy or otherwise of such accusations, Blatter is right in as much as Anson and co. are displaying a typically English approach to relations with other countries and international organisations in general - especially when they are not of English-speaking heritage. The general impression is that of a xenophobic mistrust of all things foreign: when England don't win something, Johnny Foreigner must have cheated. This is not confined to football - our current attitude to FIFA (and to a lesser extent UEFA) is mirrored in our political attitudes towards Europe over the years. We appear happier to be on the outside, trying to take the moral high ground over untrustworthy foreign types. It is our unwillingness to engage fully with such organisations and try to gain influence and promote change from within that often leaves us out in the cold, causing mistrust and suspicion to breed on both sides of the divide, do the ultimate disadvantage of all involved.
In the race to host the 2018 World Cup, it is our failure to engage and nurture relationships with FIFA delegates that did most to damage England's campaign, rather than any accusatory media stories. Fostering such relationships would have helped England's bid team to a) understand what criteria were to be applied to bids, and focus the English bid accordingly; b) gain greater influence over FIFA delegates when trying to convince them of the merit of our bid. In the longer term, it would also give us a position of greater strength if we wish to highlight and eradicate any alleged corruption within FIFA.
It is arguable that in any event, none of the western European bids stood a chance given FIFA's evident desire to spread the gospel of football to relatively uncharted waters, but it is our stubborn isolationism that Andy Anson and co. should be concentrating on, rather than simply throwing their toys out of the pram.
