Sport

Giant task for World Cup's joint hosts

YOU have to suspect that FIFA, the world soccer authority, really wants to make life difficult for itself

By PADDY AGNEW
Tue Jun 04 1996 - 01:00

YOU have to suspect that FIFA, the world soccer authority, really wants to make life difficult for itself. Last weekend, FIFA's executive decided to award the 2002 World Cup finals to both South Korea and Japan.

Depending on your political viewpoint, the FIFA decision is either inspired or irresponsible, either a brave gesture that may prompt much improved relations between historic enemies or a piece of mindless indecision mixed with opportunism. What is certain is that the first Asian World Cup finals, the first of the 21st century, look sure to be different.

A World Cup finals tournament like the last one in America, with its TV imposed madness of kick offs in the midday sun, will be nothing by comparison with the infrastuctural and political problems posed by the joint Korean Japan World Cup. For a start, which country gets to host the final?

Second, South Korea and Japan are separated by an ocean and an average two and a half hours flying time hardly ideal for the organisation of a month long tournament. Third, what happens if the barely initiated thaw in relations between South Korea and North Korea gains momentum over the next six years, resulting in the unity of Korea?

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In the end, of course, the World Cup is a televisual event and, to the televiewer, a stadium in Yokohama (Japan) looks much like one in Pusan (South Korea). Clearly, the 32 teams in the finals and their coaches will grumble about being asked to start their tournament in one country and perhaps finish it in another.

Clearly, too, those who have to travel most will cry foul. Yet, travel considerations and plane journeys are a normal part of World Cup finals even when hosted by a single nation in Mexico, in the USA and even in Italy teams travelled around by plane throughout the finals.

While television, electronics and the modern sportsperson's familiarity with constant travel can resolve the infrastructural problems, that still leaves FIFA facing a delicate political balancing act as it attempts to give both countries an equal share of the World Cup cake. Any failure to do so could immediately rekindle the type of rivalry that saw Japan and South Korea spend, between them, approximately $100 million in their attempts to promote their separate causes over the last year or so.

Only last week, the Japanese Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto said that sharing the World Cup was not an option for his government. For his part, Song Young Shik, general secretary of the South Korean promotional committee, expressed his worries about a sense of anti climax following South Korea's failure to win it alone, saying: "It will not be easy. Expectations back home were so inflamed."

Even FIFA's Mr Fixit, the normally optimistic general secretary Sepp Blatter, sounded just a little apprehensive when admitting last weekend: "The first thing we'll need is a political agreement between the two governments, because while we can provide technical solutions, they are meaningless without an agreement between the two countries".

"Obviously, the two host nations will now be qualified as of right and that means that there will be one less qualifying place available for Asia . . . As for the opening games, we can always play two of them, but that still leaves open the question of who gets the final."

Given all the apparent problems, how did FIFA arrive at such a decision? Blatter himself provided the answer when saying last weekend that, in future, FIFA would insist that only one country per region was allowed bid for the tournament. Reading between the lines, Blatter was saying that the fierce rivalry generated by South Korea and Japan had left FIFA little option but to pronounce both of them winners.

There is, of course, another more political reading of the FIFA decision and it concerns the organisation's controversial, 80 year old Brazilian president, Joao Havelange. He has been in charge of FIFA since 1974 and has been under pressure from such as UEFA president, Swede Lennart Johansson, to stand down rather than look for a seventh term of office in two years' time.

Havelange's critics accuse him of ruling FIFA in an autocratic, personalised manner that brings soccer into disrepute. As an example, they point to incidents such as his visit to Nigeria last November to "take tea" with the ruling Generals in the very week that human rights campaigner Ken Saro Wiwa and eight others were executed.

Havelange had espoused Japan's cause, while many senior FIFA figures including Johansson had supported South Korea, partly to provoke a confrontation. Johansson, aided by UEFA's Italian vice president, Antonio Mataresse, proposed the face saving idea of a shared tournament. For once, Havelange had to back down, accept the Johansson line and make the joint award on Friday, one day before FIFA's executive had been due to discuss the issue.

Intriguingly, Havelange also suffered two important reverses to the executive council meeting last Friday morning when his proposals for television and marketing contracts for both the 2002 and 2006 World Cups were dejected. It could be that the decision to award the 2002 World Cup finals to South Korea and Japan may prove significant not just for Asian soccer but also for the affairs of world soccer's governing body.