We'll never bid again to host the World Cup, says Team England boss (as Putin turns up to gloat over 'mafia state' Russia's win)

By Michael Seamark, Tim Shipman and Daniel Martin
Last updated at 3:33 PM on 3rd December 2010

Head of England campaign calls for extensive changes to the voting process
England team told Russia had enough votes to win on Wednesday
Fifa delegates believe British media 'killed' the bid

The head of the England campaign to host the 2018 World Cup today said there is no point in the country bidding for the tournament again until Fifa makes extensive changes to its voting process.
Andy Anson revealed his frustrations surrounding yesterday’s humiliating defeat to Russia as it emerged the winning team knew what Fifa's decision would be 24 hours before it was announced.
He said: 'I would say right now, don’t bother until you know that the process is going to change to allow bids like ours to win.'
England's £15million bid – spearheaded by David Cameron, Prince William and David Beckham – didn’t even get past the first round.
It secured just two of the 22 votes by committee members of football’s world governing body Fifa in a secret ballot – one of which was cast by England’s own FA chairman Geoff Thompson.
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Done deal: Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin shakes hands with Fifa president Joseph Blatter in Zurich yesterday. He flew in to Switzerland after it was announced Russia will host the 2018 World Cup

Frustrated: Andy Anson, the head of the England campaign, today said there is no point in the country bidding for the tournament again until Fifa makes extensive changes to its voting process

Mr Anson today accused Fifa of operating a secretive ballot as the row over the World Cup vote turned increasingly bitter.
Only 22 of Fifa's 208 national football associations were included in the ballot, and the voting pattern of individual delegates was kept secret.

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Mr Anson said: 'Having 22 guys voting gives them too much influence and makes the process very difficult for people to be accountable.
'[Russia] got a lot of our voters to switch from us to them.
'The electorate needs to be widened and there needs to be transparency so everybody knows who voted for whom.'
He added: 'I still find what happened yesterday hard to understand and hard to believe.'

Three wounded lions: A glum David Cameron, Prince William and David Beckham after the announcement

Three wounded lions: A glum David Cameron, Prince William and David Beckham after the announcement

Sports minister Hugh Robertson said it had been a mistake to stage the votes for 2018 and 2022 together.
He suggested secrets deals and 'trading votes' may have been behind Russia’s win.
He said: 'Early indications are that the decision to link the two votes has not helped England. All the talk in Zurich has been about trading votes.
'The extraordinary aspect of this bidding process is that we came top in the independent technical assessment of the bids yet still received the least number of votes and we need to understand why.'
It today emerged that Russia knew who the winner would be on Wednesday.
Alexey Sorokin, the chief executive of Russia's bid, was so confident of success he told the England team in Zurich on Wednesday that his country had enough votes to secure victory.
Amid strong suspicions of shady backroom deals, the tournament went to Russia, branded a ‘virtual mafia state’ in leaked U.S. diplomatic cables this week.

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Disappointment for England: FIFA President Sepp Blatter unveils Russia as the 2018 World Cup hosts

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Gutted: England 2018 International President David Dein and Prince William reacting to the announcement

Last night Downing Street did little to hide its anger and said Mr Cameron had no plans to congratulate the Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin personally ‘at the present time’.

WILL BRITAIN'S MEDIA BE BLAMED FOR LOSING VOTES?

The BBC and other media organisations were last night blamed for England losing the bid.
The Sunday Times and BBC1’s flagship current affairs programme Panorama recently produced investigations into the controversial dealings of Fifa’s tight-knit executive committee.
Some within the England campaign had claimed the increased scrutiny of such a secretive body could harm the bid.
England captain Rio Ferdinand, giving his reaction on Twitter yesterday, said: ‘The timing of the Panorama programme was bad taste, fact.’
And Japan’s Junji Ogura, understood to be the only non-English Fifa member who voted for the English bid, said: ‘England was eliminated in the first round, and they were maybe affected by the BBC and The Sunday Times’s reporting.
‘England has full facilities and they could hold the World Cup any time. I think England’s media reporting affected Fifa executive committee members.’

Shortly after Fifa president Sepp Blatter declared Russia the winner for 2018, he announced that Qatar, a tiny desert country which has never even qualified to play in the World Cup, would host the 2022 tournament, beating bids from Australia, the United States and a joint bid from Japan and South Korea.
Fifa’s controversial decisions reinforced suspicions that the voting process was corrupt and that the sport’s world governing body had been seduced by the energy-rich countries’ billions, meaning that England’s bid never stood a chance.
A ‘bitterly disappointed’ and visibly furious Mr Cameron said England had the best technical bid and what he believed was the strongest commercial bid, adding: ‘It turns out that’s not enough.’
Asked what more England could have done to secure the tournament, the Prime Minister replied: ‘I think that’s for others to say.’
A crestfallen Prince William, who spent the last three days in a hectic round of meetings with Fifa delegates, said: ‘Well, obviously we’re extremely disappointed and so is the team. We had a very strong bid but sadly it didn’t work out.
‘The guys are quite down at the moment but they put their whole backs into it. It’s very sad. We gave everything we could and the guys, I’m so proud of them.
‘I’m sorry for the fans back home. We gave everything we could.’
When Mr Cameron met Russian president Dmitry Medvedev he had challenged him to a ‘good clean fight’ but last night the Prime Minister’s official spokesman refused to say the voting process was either good or clean.

What World Cup? Russians in Red Square, Moscow, appear indifferent to the news

Galling: Fans braved the cold near Tower Bridge to find out if England had managed to secure the World Cup

Desolation: Young children in Manchester react to the news that football is not coming home

Number 10 aides were furious with the outcome after Mr Cameron had made two flying visits to Zurich where the vote was held and been up into the small hours yesterday frantically lobbying for crucial votes.
So committed was the Government to win the bid that Mr Blatter was even allowed to hold Mr Cameron’s baby daughter Florence when he visited Downing Street recently.
But despite three days of intense lobbying in Zurich by the Three Lions, the England bid team feared they had been damaged by a backlash against corruption investigations into Fifa members by BBC’s Panorama and the Sunday Times.

TODAY'S POLL

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin shakes hands with FIFA President Joseph Blatter

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Former England captain Beckham admitted some of the delegates had mentioned the allegations.
Mr Anson also said today that Fifa delegates believe the British media 'killed' the bid.
Speaking at a press conference at the bid team's headquarters in Zurich, he said: 'We have spoken to some executive committee members. And I'll be very clear that what they are saying to us is one thing.
'I'll caveat this by saying this is not our excuse at all. But they are saying to us that our media killed us.'
Mr Anson added: 'My only issue, as you know, with the Sunday Times and the BBC, and more the BBC, was the timing of it.
'For us, it was almost impossible to bounce back with three or four weeks to go.
'And then in the last week to actually know that Fifa executive committee members were saying to us that our media is killing us.'
Mr Anson was repeatedly pressed on who did not deliver on their promise of voting for England, but he refused to reveal any names.

Too little, too late: David Beckham and Chief Executive Andy Anson after England's loss

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Jubilation: The Russian delegation react with delight as they are named the winners

Yet after the polished final presentation yesterday morning – with speeches to Fifa delegates by Mr Cameron, Beckham and Prince William – hopes rose when Mr Blatter described the 30-minute performance as ‘excellent and remarkable’.
Behind closed doors, however, the Fifa delegates immediately wrecked any chance of sending the tournament back to England for the first time since 1966.
Despite growing optimism in recent days, England only got two votes in the first round of the secret ballot and were immediately eliminated.
Even rank outsiders Netherlands/Belgium got four votes, with Spain/Portugal receiving seven votes and Russia nine votes.
After a second round of voting, in which England did not feature, Russia was declared the clear winner – despite the notable absence in Zurich of Mr Putin, who didn’t bother to turn up and has accused the British media of running a ‘dirty tricks’ campaign.
Mr Anson said some of the votes England were counting on had failed to materialise.
He added: ‘When people look you in the eye and promise you something, you hope they live up to their word - but clearly that hasn’t happened.’

Party time: Russian billionaire and Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich reacts to the news

David Davies, the former FA executive chairman, said: ‘I heard one particular European voter who all the way through had seemed to be a certainty for England, let England down at the last minute. Now that was extraordinary.’
London mayor Boris Johnson said: ‘I certainly don’t think they made a decision based on the merits of the bid because I think the bid was absolutely fantastic.’
Former England manager Graham Taylor said: ‘What did we expect? Fifa, as far as I’m concerned, is full of people who say yes to your face and no behind your back.
‘I think it is about time that Fifa were really investigated.’
Fifa’s decision to hold secret ballots for the two tournaments together has already been criticised and Mr Anson said: ‘Running two World Cups together was clearly a mistake. It inevitably led to people with votes in 2018 doing deals with people involved in 2022.’

Ruled by crooks, thugs and spies - the country that won the bid

By EDWARD LUCAS

American diplomats have lifted the lid on Russia under Vladimir Putin, painting an unvarnished picture of colossal corruption and brutal lawlessness.
The material in diplomatic cables disclosed this week by WikiLeaks is worthy of the most fearless investigative journalist. The analysis is stark and unmistakable.

It's ours: Russian Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov, right, holds the World Cup trophy beside FIFA president Sepp Blatter

Russia is a ‘mafia state’, where the feared successor to the Soviet KGB, the FSB (as the Federal Security Service is known), wields vast power, operating as a state within a state in which the spoils of corruption have reached more than £200 billion a year.
Explosively, the leaked cables allege Mr Putin might have enriched himself personally, possibly to the tune of billions of pounds.
They contain extraordinary allegations about the vast personal wealth he and his top cronies are supposedly to have amassed.
As Russia celebrated winning its bid to stage the 2018 World Cup, these cables serve as a salutary reminder of what Putin’s Russia has become.
After the recent allegations of widespread bribe-taking and corruption among FIFA officials who decide where the World Cup is staged, it is surely fitting that the winning bid went to a country being looted and misruled by a cabal of crooks and spooks - perhaps the biggest and most powerful organised crime syndicate that the world has ever seen.

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Crestfallen: Hardy England fans react to the announcement in London

Any notion that Russia is heading for an era of reform or modernisation under Dmitry Medvedev, the president and Mr Putin’s nominal boss, can be dismissed.
Mr Putin is described in the WikiLeaks cables as the ‘alpha dog’, Mr Medvedev is described as ‘playing Robin to Putin’s Batman’.
That is probably unfair on Batman, who is known for fighting crime, not benefiting from its proceeds.

BID HIGHS AND LOWS

There have been several own goals during England's bid to host the 2018 World Cup.

OCTOBER 2007 FA confirms England will bid to host 2018 World Cup finals
JANUARY 2009 Bid is officially submitted to Fifa
MARCH 2009 Premier League added to board after criticism
MAY 2009 Beckham, Rooney and Gordon Brown officially launch bid
OCTOBER 2009 Fifa vice-president Jack Warner says England's bid is 'only creeping along when it should be galloping'
OCTOBER 2009 Bid bosses criticised for giving designer handbags to Fifa executives
NOVEMBER 2009 Bid board is overhauled after emergency meeting
NOVEMBER 2009 Premier League chairman Sir Dave Richards quits board
MAY 2010 Lord Triesman quits after secret tape reveals he told a friend Spain could drop its bid if Russia helped bribe referees at 2010 event
OCTOBER 2010 England pulls out of 2022 campaign to focus on 2018
OCTOBER 2010 Allegations in Sunday Times that six Fifa officials asked for cash in return for World Cup votes. Fears of anti-England backlash. Officials are later suspended
OCTOBER 2010 Row with Russia after their bid chief highlights London's 'high crime rate' and youth alcohol problems
NOVEMBER 5 2010 Panorama reveals it is investigating Fifa. England writes to members in attempt to repair damage
NOVEMBER 30 2010 Panorama show accuses three Fifa executives of taking bribes in $100m corruption scandal
DECEMBER 2010 England poll just two votes among Fifa delegates in Zurich and do not even go through to the second round of voting

But it is quite fair to caricature the diminutive and ineffective Mr Medvedev.
He bleats about reforming the legal system, fighting corruption and making Russia a modern and civilised country. But nothing happens.
We should remember it is the long-suffering people of Russia who are the greatest victims in this as their corrupt leaders fill their pockets.
We should also bear in mind the plight of Russia’s neighbours, such as our brave allies in the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania — as well as lonely Georgia, the only free-market democracy on Russia’s southern fringe.
They have warned us about the dangers of the Russian criminal, xenophobic and authoritarian regime for years.
Publicly we in the West have pooh-poohed their fear. Privately, if the evidence of these cables is anything to go by, we agreed with every word.
So the cables lay bare the wider cost of our cowardice and complacency. Russian corruption does not just fester at home.
It leaks abroad, giving the hard men in Moscow the ability to cut deals and pull strings. That affects this nation’s future, security and freedom.
The cables’ revelations about Italy are particularly striking. One of the biggest economies in the EU, and a supposedly stalwart member of Nato, is in Russia’s grip, thanks to the extraordinary and personal ties between Mr Putin and the Italian leader, Silvio Berlusconi.
The cables highlight a shadowy Russian-speaking go-between Valentino Valentini, who visits Russia regularly on mysterious errands connected, the diplomats allege, with Mr Berlusconi’s business interests there. He also ferries lavish gifts between the two leaders.
Even more sensationally, they allege Mr Berlusconi was promised a personal cut in the profits of any pipeline constructed jointly by the giant Russian gas company Gazprom, and Italy’s ENI.
They show that Italy, and other pro-Russian countries in Europe, have sabotaged efforts to form a common front against Russian bullying.
The handful of Russia experts in the Italian foreign ministry, it records, are demoralised and ignored. Russia is Mr Berlusconi’s personal project. Nothing and nobody get in the way.
In Spain, Russian influence is even more malignant, though at least some fearless officials are willing to try to fight it.
One cable quotes a Spanish prosecutor who says Russia habitually uses its mafia bosses to carry out Kremlin-sponsored arms trafficking there.

Best of pals: Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi and his Russian counterpart Mr Putin are closely linked

Spain has become a hotbed of the Russian mafia whose activities in that country include laundering money from ‘illicit activities conducted elsewhere, including contract killings, arms and drugs trafficking, extortion, coercion, threats and kidnappings’.
British officials come out of this rather well. I have accused them of being gullible and naive in the past, but the cables tell another story, at least through American eyes.

SUCCESSFUL BIDS BUILT ON BILLIONS FROM OIL AND GAS

In the end, it wasn’t really about football but the oil and gas billions of Russia and Qatar.
If there was any doubt that the dubious process all came down to money, fans need only consider the natural disadvantages of the two winning countries.
In Qatar, on the fringe of the Arabian Desert, players will have to play in temperatures of up to 53c (127f).
And Russia – quite apart from its record of football racism and organised crime – is so vast that travel is inordinately time-consuming and expensive. Neither country can boast state-of-the-art football arenas – they will have to be built.
Each will have a carbon footprint comparable to a coal-fired power station.
England spent £15million on promoting its 2018 bid.
But Russia spent at least £25million, with oligarchs such as Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich contributing millions more.
And Qatar spent an estimated £108million.Both countries are propped up by the billions flowing in from their vast energy reserves.

The brainy Michael Davenport, an old Moscow hand who is now political director at the Foreign Office, tells a U.S. diplomat that Russia is a ‘corrupt autocracy’.
The anger in British officialdom over the murder in London of the Russian exile Alexander Litvenko, in which the FSB was complicit, is plainly recorded in the cables, too.
What is less plain is why our leaders, in London, Washington and Brussels, still publicly maintain the pretence that the Russian government deserves to be treated as the civilised leadership of a normal country.
For years I have been warning of the danger that the ex-KGB regime in Russia poses there and here. The usual reaction I get from officials is polite, patronising and dismissive.
Yes, they say, Russia is a rather dodgy place. But we have to rub along. There are some signs of progress. Let’s make the best of it.
Now, it turns out that American (and British, French, German and Spanish) officials actually agree with the most hawkish views on Russia.
So why do our politicians not act on the information they receive from their officials? Why is the American administration pursuing a farcical ‘human rights dialogue’ with its Russian counterparts — who are tarred as gangsters by their own diplomats?
More pertinently, what did Peter Mandelson think he was doing taking hospitality on the yacht of Oleg Deripaska in 2008?
One of the richest men in Russia and a leading henchman of the Putin regime, Deripaska has had grave difficulty in even gaining an American visa, so murky and troubling are his past business practices.
What was Tony Blair thinking of when he invited Mr Putin in 2005 to the inner sanctum of British power, the secret underground bunker below Downing Street?

FIFA members Nicolas Leoz of Paraguay (left) and Brazil's Ricardo Terra Teixeira were accused by Panorama of taking payments. They have both been suspended by the governing body and banned from voting today

What do MPs such as Liberal Democrat loudmouth Mike Hancock, chairman of Westminster’s all-party Russia group, have to say about their support for Putin’s Kremlin?
And what about the commentariat? The people in think-tanks, universities and the media who always had a kind word for the Kremlin, and have dismissed its critics as paranoid and fanciful?
The U.S. diplomatic service, having had access to truly secret intelligence, has come to an unambiguous conclusion in these cables. It believes the political system in Russia is rotten from top to bottom.
It is greedy, lawless and brutal. And the malign influence of this is even seeping through our own front door.
America may have been humiliated by the leak of its private diplomatic messages. But Russia, and its defenders, are exposed in all their ugly reality.

WATCHING YOU...WATCHING ME

Friday, December 3, 2010

Are AMERICA & ENGLAND looking for World War Three...with their insults?..Its only a bloody game of football...

We'll never bid again to host the World Cup, says Team England boss (as Putin turns up to gloat over 'mafia state' Russia's win)

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WILL BRITAIN'S MEDIA BE BLAMED FOR LOSING VOTES?

Ruled by crooks, thugs and spies - the country that won the bid

BID HIGHS AND LOWS

SUCCESSFUL BIDS BUILT ON BILLIONS FROM OIL AND GAS