United States, Canada and Mexico launch joint-bid for 2026 World Cup

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(Sports Today Wednesday 12 April 2017)

United States, Canada and Mexico launch joint-bid for 2026 World Cup

Victor Montagliani, left, President of the Canadian Soccer Association, Sunil Gulati, center,

President of the United States Soccer Federation, and Decio de Maria,

President of the Mexican Football Federation, sign the document of intent to FIFA seeking

to co-host the 2026 World Cup. Photo: AP

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By Andrew Das -

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Updated: 12:22 PM, April 12, 2017

NEW YORK — The United States, Mexico and Canada will mount a combined bid to host the 2026 World Cup, top soccer officials from the three countries said on Monday (April 10) as they unveiled a paradigm-shifting plan for the tournament that will involve more cities, more teams and, perhaps most important, more profits for world soccer’s governing body, Fifa.

The United States would be the senior partner in the plan, hosting 60 of the 80 games. Mexico and Canada would host 10 each. “That is our proposal,” said Sunil Gulati, the US federation president. But he said Fifa had the final say on the distribution of games. “It’s their tournament.”

Gulati said that the bid had the full support of President Donald Trump, whose tough talk about Mexico was a major theme in his campaign. Gulati said Trump was especially encouraged about Mexico taking part.

The 2026 event will be the first to include 48 teams instead of the current 32, an expansion that a newly populist Fifa has billed as opening the quadrennial championship to more countries. Its critics have derided the change as both a watering down of the event and a brazen money grab.

It is quite possibly all of those things, but the sheer scope of an 80-game event — up from the current 64 — played out over more than a month by its nature requires a reserve of stadiums, practice facilities, hotels and transportation infrastructure that only a limited number of countries can offer. By bidding as a group effort with plans to spread the schedule across the United States, Canada and Mexico, the three rivals from Concacaf — the regional confederation that includes North and Central America and the Caribbean — most likely assured that their bid will be accepted.

Projections of added revenue for FIFA from ticket sales, sponsorships and television revenues — US$1 billion (S$1.41 billion) or more by some estimates — should help the North American cause as well. Many of the world’s federations receive the majority of their financing from World Cup payouts, even if they don’t take part — or may never take part — in the event itself.

Still, significant issues — and potential disagreements — remain. The prize games like the opening match, the semi-finals and the final are the most sought-after prizes but are limited in number, and US Soccer officials are believed to covet most of them. Mexico City’s Azteca stadium hosted the 1970 and 1986 finals, but the city’s altitude would be a competitive issue for teams that had played previous matches at sea level.

Similarly, the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California, hosted the 1994 final, so there will be pressure to place the next championship game in another city, perhaps a major market like New York or a more central one like Dallas or Houston.

Yet, even in secondary roles to the United States, which is expected to host the majority of the matches, Mexico and Canada can point to obvious reasons to sign on to a joint bid. Mexico, the 1970 and 1986 World Cup host, would become the first nation to host matches at three World Cup finals. And Canada would join the United States, Sweden and Germany as the only countries to have put on a men’s and women’s World Cup. France will join that exclusive club when it hosts the 2019 women’s championship.

Some details of the 2026 bidding are already known. Under a schedule approved by Fifa in October, a process of confirmed bids, inspections and eval‎uations will be completed by early 2020, with the vote to award the hosting rights set to occur at a Fifa congress in May 2020.

Last year’s plan also affirmed rules abut a hosting rotation among Fifa’s confederations that made it more likely that the United States would be in a favoured position for 2026 — either alone or with partners. By excluding countries from bidding if their regional confederation has hosted either of the previous two World Cups, Fifa blocked countries in Europe and Asia from entering the race because Russia (2018) and Qatar (2022) have the next two competitions.

Unless those rules are changed, that prohibits potential rivals like England and China from challenging a North American bid, a point that was not lost on Gulati when the decision was announced last year as US Soccer was still contemplating its bid options. Asked in October if the elimination of Europe and Asia from the process helped his region’s cause, Gulati responded coyly: “Oh really, I hadn’t noticed that. Perhaps.”

Since officials from South America, which hosted the 2014 tournament in Brazil, have signaled that they will focus on a 2030 bid, perhaps in a partnership between Argentina and Uruguay, and because no country from Africa or Oceania currently has the infrastructure to host an expanded, 48-team tournament, the United States-Mexico-Canada bid is widely expected to succeed. Having two key members on the FIFA Council - Gulati and Montagliani, who as president of CONCACAF is also a FIFA vice president - also gives the bid two powerful, well-connected voices with access to the organisation’s membership.

Both Gulati and Montagliani have increased their profiles within FIFA in the wake of a broad corruption investigation, led by the US Justice Department, in which dozens of top soccer officials have been arrested and convicted since a series of raids at FIFA gatherings in 2015. That scandal traced some of its roots to the last World Cup hosting vote, in 2010, in which Russia and Qatar beat out rivals in a process that was tainted by widespread allegations of bribery and vote-trading.

The scandals hang over the current process. Bidding for 2026 was to have begun in 2015, with a vote this year, but it was delayed after the first wave of FIFA arrests in May 2015. And the decision on a host nation now will be made in a vote of FIFA’s entire membership - 211 countries - and not by a small cadre of top officials acting in secrecy. The FIFA Council will have final say on whether all three co-hosts will be granted direct entry to the field, however; if they are, their places will come out of CONCACAF’s allotment for the tournament.

One prize that the old guard did hand out before exiting the stage, however, was the lucrative television rights. Those were awarded to Fox Sports and Telemundo in a no-bid arrangement in early 2015 that also was a direct result of the 2010 vote for Qatar. FIFA’s secretary-general at the time, Jrme Valcke, acknowledged that the television contracts were extended - without being opened to bidders like ESPN and Univision, which once held the rights - in order to head off potential litigation after FIFA moved the 2022 tournament to the winter from its traditional summer home.

The schedule change was made to get the tournament out of the searing heat of the Gulf summer - precisely the reason many said Qatar was unfit to host in the first place - but adding a third World Cup to the two they already had won, and doing so at a nominal increase of only 10 percent, was a valuable windfall for the networks. In addition to locking out rivals like ESPN and Univision that would have driven up the price, it means they can broadcast matches in prime time across North America, to an audience increasingly hungry for top-flight soccer and probably with the certainty that the national teams from the continent’s biggest markets will be taking part. NEW YORK TIMES