Is this football’s first win-win-win-win-win-win?
Six World Cup hosts, six guaranteed qualification slots, six and a bit years for everyone else to get their heads around it.
You wait months and months for a decision on who is going to host a major football tournament and then you get 13 hosts announced in one day. Confused? We think that may be the point.
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While we look forward to the 2028 Euros in England, the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, start saving for the 2030 World Cup in Argentina, Morocco, Paraguay, Portugal, Spain and Uruguay, and wonder how Italy and Turkey are going to share out the 2032 Euros. Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, can enjoy a clear run at staging another winter World Cup in 2034, although Australia are still “exploring the possibility” of putting their name in the hat.
Magicians call this misdirection; FIFA calls it the “confederation rotation principle” and by grouping three confederations together in 2030 — Africa, Europe and South America — it leaves the way clear for Asia and Oceania to host the 2034 tournament. What price a joint bid from American Samoa and Samoa?
But that is a debate for another day. Let us focus on the decision to share the 2030 World Cup finals between three countries on one continent and three other countries, 6,000 miles away from those three nations, that span two other continents.
Is this all about someone’s attempt to gain free access to airport lounges around the globe? Maybe. It is not about anyone’s attempt to polish their green credentials, although we suspect this World Cup will be billed as the most sustainable ever. They always are.
No, this is about money and saving face, although there is a bit of romance in there, too.
The first thing you need to understand about bidding contests is they are great fun until you lose one. What most bidders want is a coronation, not a contest.
The governing bodies, however, quite like contests, as it makes their event look in-demand, which helps when you are trying to sell media rights and sponsorships, and their bosses get treated like royalty wherever they go.
However, even the most vain governing-body boss knows what is best of all is the appearance of a contest, with just the right amount of lobbying, before everyone agrees that bid X is the best bet and bid Y can have a consolation prize.
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And that is what has happened here.
FIFA, football’s world governing body, has six confederations: Africa, Asia, Europe, Central and North America, South America and Oceania — which is basically New Zealand plus 10 Pacific Island nations.
As you may remember, the 2022 World Cup was played in Qatar, which is a member of the Asian Football Confederation. The 2026 World Cup is going to be a CONCACAF extravaganza, as it is being shared by the three largest members of that confederation — Canada, Mexico and the United States.
This order of events should have left the way clear for a proper ding-dong between Africa, Europe and South America to host the 2030 edition.
However, Africa has only ever hosted one World Cup, the 2010 tournament in South Africa, and the South African people are still paying for it. Furthermore, the intervening years have not been kind to the African Football Confederation, as it has lurched from crisis to crisis, and has even had a period in special measures, when FIFA was effectively running the show.
A purely African bid has been considered a non-starter, then. Morocco, to its credit, has kept bidding for World Cups but defeat by the CONCACAF juggernaut at the 2018 FIFA Congress was the North African country’s fifth failure at this game in 30 years.
However, even before FIFA decided in 2017 to expand the men’s World Cup from 32 to 48 teams, we had moved into the era of joint bids. After all, there are not many countries with a dozen FIFA-standard football stadiums ready to go, and even FIFA has got out of the habit of expecting nations that do not have them to build them anyway, regardless of whether they really need them or not.
For all its wealth, Qatar scaled back its original plan to use a dozen venues and went with eight, seven of which were new.
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So, the new mantra is spread the load, share the love, and this brings Africa back into the picture as a hosting partner. But with whom?
At the start of this year, it looked like Saudi Arabia, still smarting that neighbour Qatar had beaten it to the punch, was going to try to fool everyone into forgetting that it was not Asia’s turn yet by teaming up with Egypt (Africa) and Greece (Europe). It even considered a joint bid with Italy.
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Thankfully, the Saudis eventually realised that eight years is not long enough between winter World Cups in the Gulf, and that maybe it should focus on improving its domestic league, encouraging more girls to play sport at home and building up its tourism infrastructure. They have cracked on with that.
That left two interested parties: Europe and South America.
Once upon a time, these two superpowers simply took it in turns as World Cup hosts but that is not a global approach to the world’s most popular game. No, these two were going to have to duke it out and that could be… awkward.
On the one hand, you had UEFA, Europe’s governing body, pointing out it should really be getting every third World Cup, what with most of the world’s best players working there, European nations winning the thing regularly and European broadcasters writing big cheques for the media rights.
Europeans just had to decide, among themselves, who to put forward, to avoid the embarrassment of a split vote. And, having persuaded serial losers England to concentrate on a British/Irish bid for the Euros instead, UEFA proposed a Portugal-Spain combo.
On the other hand, though, 2030 will be the centenary of the first World Cup in Uruguay and, in an age when entertainment is all about narratives, milestones matter.
Uruguay, with its population of 3.4million (slightly less than Los Angeles), was not suggesting it should host a party for 47 other nations and provide venues to host 104 games of football over five weeks on its own. No, the plan, as devised by CONMEBOL, South America’s confederation, was to get neighbours Argentina, Chile and Paraguay in on the act, too.
Small problem. None of these countries possess a single stadium that FIFA would be entirely happy with. They have a few that could be spruced up but that would cost money these nations either do not have or do not want to spend on sprucing up football stadiums.
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Who can blame them? They had front-row seats for what happened when Brazil decided it could afford a World Cup/Olympics double bill in 2014 and 2016. Long story short? It couldn’t.
In the meantime, UEFA was looking to add romance, or sympathy, to its bid by tacking Ukraine onto the Iberian duo. The sentiment was understandable but the plan was not. Even if the war with Russia finished tomorrow, Ukraine is going to have more pressing concerns than finding the right number of five-star hotel beds and elite training facilities.
A far better third party was eventually found in Morocco, fresh off a rousing run to the semi-finals at Qatar 2022. It was there, eight miles (13km) away across the Straits of Gibraltar, all along, sitting patiently with its bloc vote of 54 African member associations.
Suddenly, what looked like a two-horse race had become a walkover.
But wait!
If a sports governing body cannot honour its past, it really might as well pack up and give in. Of course, there had to also be a birthday-party element to 2030.
And it is not like CONMEBOL and UEFA have been at loggerheads. On the contrary, these two have been cosying up to each other ever since FIFA started fluttering its eyelids at the rising Asian economies in China and the Gulf. The vibe has been “us old-timers need to stick together”. So, they signed a memorandum of understanding in 2020, then renewed it 18 months later to create a partnership until 2028.
At first, it looked like Europe and South America had just agreed to be wary of whatever FIFA president Gianni Infantino came up with next. Annual 24-team Club World Cups? Nope. A global Nations League? No, thanks. Biennial World Cups? Not a chance.
But then they started doing stuff together, stuff that looked a bit like a threat to FIFA. A shared office in London, a programme to develop referees, Finalissima matches between their respective men’s and women’s champions. And now the greatest joint venture of all: a World Cup separated by thousands of miles of ocean.
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Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay will host the start of the tournament, with an opening ceremony and one group-stage game each. The first one will be in Montevideo’s Estadio Centenario, which, if you have not guessed, is where it all started in 1930. Some might say not a huge amount has changed at the venue since then, but FIFA’s corporate guests will no doubt turn a blind eye to the missing roof, hospitality boxes and Michelin-starred restaurants for 90 minutes.
Those three nations also get their free passes into the tournament, which is perhaps not the stroke of fortune you might think it is, as six of the 10 CONMEBOL nations will qualify directly for a 48-team World Cup and a seventh could make it, too, via a play-off.
Spare a thought for Chile, though. FIFA has apparently drawn the line at six hosts and three opening ceremonies. So Chile’s wait for a global platform continues.
Anyway, back to those who have made the cut.
While six teams are ticking the “legends” box in South America, the other 42 competing nations will be in Morocco, Portugal and Spain, playing matches four through 104, where they will be joined, as soon as possible, by the six sides that have played their openers in Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay.
Will they be tired and jet-lagged? Maybe. But never mind, think about the spectacle.
And FIFA can think about the revenues pouring in from those games at the redeveloped Bernabeu, Camp Nou and Mestalla, and be pleased that a World Cup in a European time zone is a much easier sell to broadcasters around the globe than one in the Americas.
So, six winners, nine if you include CONMEBOL, FIFA and UEFA.
But there is more. There is always more.
Because by knocking off three continents in one World Cup, FIFA gets to tick around again to Asia.
Wednesday’s decision caught many seasoned FIFA observers on the hop but do you know who was ready for it? Within a couple of hours of the 2030 news dropping, Saudi Arabia announced its intention to bid to stage the 2034 World Cup. On its own.
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“Hosting a FIFA World Cup in 2034 would help us achieve our dream of becoming a leading nation in world sport and would mark a significant milestone in the country’s transformation,” said Saudi sports minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Turki Al Faisal.
“As an emerging and welcoming home for all sports, we believe that hosting a FIFA World Cup is a natural next step in our football journey.”
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The same could be said about China, or India, or a joint bid between Australia (which is an Asian nation in football politics) and New Zealand (Oceania’s superpower), as happened with this year’s Women’s World Cup, or the much-mooted, possibly mythical, bid from a to-be-finalised group of south east Asian countries.
But none of those has spent the last year chucking wads of cash at famous footballers, building new cities in the desert, signing various memoranda of understanding with African football associations, getting officials on FIFA committees and hosting every available sports event and sports conference.
The fact that FIFA wants to make this decision next year is going to make it difficult for anyone, even China, to catch up with the lead Saudi has built in a race that started… about six hours before I wrote this sentence.
So, 10 winners, then! Double figures. Amazing.
Well done, everyone.
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(Top photo: Buda Mendes/Getty Images)