Gambling On Sport With Tax Payers’ Money

Despite the fallout, the “can’t bat, can’t bowl, can’t run between wickets” Ashes debacle was not the worst disaster in Australian sport over the last twelve months. That title goes to the losing “one vote wonder” World Cup Soccer bid.

Unlike the soccer bid, a number of bona fide explanations can be held up for the 3-1 Ashes loss to England. These include poor scheduling resulting in an overplayed Australian outfit, a team discipline regime involving drinking with the Barmy Army in the middle of the test match, lack of money in development of state players and the normal boom slump cycle occurring after Australia’s golden era of the late nineties/early two-thousands. Quite simply put, being trounced so spectacularly on pitches that we should have had an advantage on was embarrassing and unexpected. But in terms of sporting travesties, it just doesn’t compare to recklessly pouring $45.6 million of tax payers’ money into a perilous campaign to win the favours of the notorious FIFA Executive Committee.

The FIFA bid was the brain child of Australia’s richest man, Frank Lowy. Worth a whopping $5.04 billion, Lowy is co-founder of Westfield Shopping Centres Group, a former Reserve Bank board member, founder of the Lowy Institute, chairman of The Institute for National Security Studies and chairman of Football Federation Australia. It’s a resume that lends itself to pushing two ambitious World Cup bids in the space of 12 months without a care for the millions of tax-payer dollars that would be wasted. Lowy knows that his fortune certainly wouldn’t be dented in the push. In fact, quite the opposite. If Australia won the bid, Westfield Shopping Centres would be more than happy to provide over-priced goods and services to thousands of World Cup spectators from around the globe and investors would come flooding in.

A number of exiguous explanations for the lost bid were bandied around in the post mortem commentary. Was the video presentation too childish? Maybe we should have promised to air condition Queensland? More than one commentator argued that Gillard’s accent must have grated on the FIFA Executive Committee’s ears during her introductory monologue which caused them to switch their vote! Many wanted to believe that Qatar played dirty whereas Australia’s bid was squeaky clean. The Australian bid team did nothing to quash such suggestions. In fact, Australia’s campaign was not squeaky clean and included gifts to FIFA Executive members. This is a common feature in any World Cup bid. Some are even allowed under FIFA’s rules.

FIFA’s world of ticket scandals, bribes and vote riggings are well-known thanks to the investigations of British journalist Andrew Jennings. According to Jennings, FIFA Executive Committee votes are bought and sold in deals involving hundreds and thousands of dollars worth of bribes, not to mention the cost of wining and dining the members if you want to have a chance of winning any World Cup bid or elected position. Relationships between FIFA heavies are built over decades. In 1998 Sepp Blatter’s presidential bid was financially backed by the very wealthy Mohamed Bin Hammam from Qatar. Mohamed Bin Hammam is now President of the Asian Football Confederation and played a large role in the Qatar 2022 World Cup bid.

Lowry and the FFA were perfectly happy to play this grubby game and spend millions Australian tax payer dollars as well as FFA funds. They hired lobbyists Fedor Radmann and Peter Hargitay for $1.35 million and $3.91 million respectively to mastermind the deals. According to The Age newspaper they canvassed giving Blatter’s daughter a job if the Australian bid was successful. The Aussie bid team gave FIFA Vice-President and Executive Committeee member Jack Warner’s wife a necklace worth approximately $2000. They also paid tens of thousands of dollars for Warner’s Trinidad and Tobago under-20 team to travel to Cyprus. If the bid was successful they promised to give $6.5 million in taxpayer funds to football bodies in Africa, Asia and Oceania. This may not even be the end of the dirty dealings given that The Age obtained a confidential FFA spreadsheet from 2009 which showed a $12 million variation in how the FFA internally accounted for its spending of a $45.6 million grant and what the Government was told about this spending.

“Can anybody actually think of a population on earth less deserving of the World Cup than Qatar?” tweeted Ned Boulting, journalist for The Telegraph in the UK. There are racist undertones to Boulting’s comments given that Australia’s soccer team is almost as hopeless (we’ve qualified for only three of the nineteen World Cups compared with Qatar’s none). Surely Australia is just as undeserving since we play very similar games on and off the pitch.

The bid was a disaster of epic proportions and makes the Ashes loss look almost dignified. Gambling $100 would make most Australian workers nervous. Frank Lowy, Julia Gillard and then Sports Minister Kate Ellis shamelessly gambled $45.6 million of tax payer’s hard-earned money on a campaign which was unwinnable from the start. The scary thing is that governments and national sports organisations all over the world have been doing the same thing for decades with little accountability for them or the FIFA Executive. Bidding for the beautiful game is the dirtiest game of them all.