And the winner is … Qatar

You would have to have been living on another planet to not know that world football governing body FIFA awarded hosting of its 2022 World Cup to the Arabian Gulf nation of Qatar – the Qatari bid beating other, apparently stronger, bids from Australia, Japan, Korea and the USA. The wisdom of awarding the event to a nation with a population of less than two million with limited sporting heritage has been widely debated, as has the timing of the event: will it be held in January, during the northern hemisphere winter; or should it be held, as planned, in July, when the Qataris have pledged to deliver climate controlled stadia to counter the country’s extreme summer temperatures? Yet, Qatar’s hosting of the 2011 Asian Cup in January resulted from the event having been moved from its originally scheduled dates in July. The reason was that the Asian Football Confederation felt that playing the competition in Qatar in July would be too hot! Nigel Benton, Publisher, Australasian Leisure Management. http://www.ausleisure.com.au

While Australia makes strange some odd football decisions

Meanwhile, Australia, which will be hosting the 2015 Asian Cup, plans to stage the event in January – Australia’s hottest and, as we have just seen, most climatically challenging month! In the aftermath of the failure of Australia’s FIFA World Cup 2022 bid, many media commentators suggested that Australia’s bid failed because it was "too clean". Yet the Sydney Morning Herald recently reported that the Football Federation Australia could not account for $11 million of the $45.6 million provided by the Federal Government to help mount the bid. In addition, the FFA’s use of ‘lobbyists’ Peter Hargitay and Fedor Radmann in the bid has been questioned. Described by investigative journalist Andrew Jennings (the veteran reporter behind the BBC documentary ‘FIFA’s Dirty Secrets’) as “dirty people”, Hargitay and Radmann received in excess of $3.5 million for their consultancy services, a fee that would have risen by a further $6.5 million payment if the bid had been successful. Nigel Benton, Publisher, Australasian Leisure Management. http://www.ausleisure.com.au