Andy Anson puts pressure on the FA to change the World Cup bidding process - Part 2
England bid’s Chief Executive further elaborated upon England’s bid. Anson said, "We have been talking to various people and I think our tally is back up to five from the people who have told us they voted for us. We thought we
might have gone out in the first round with five votes, so when we were told we had two we were shocked.”
Adding to his remarks, the Chief Executive stated, "We had to believe there were still enough decent people in that room. People told us they looked at the technical books, looked at the bid books...we thought they'd take things
seriously but that proved not to be true."
Some of the votes from the CONCACAF were missing from the FIFA Executive Committee due to the suspension of 2 committee members for corruption charges in November, charges that were brought forward thanks to the investigative journalism
of the Sunday Times.
Anson commented on the missing votes as he said, "The CONCACAF guys clearly told us they would make their mind up on the day of presentations and if they had come to us not Russia we'd have been five votes each and Holland/Belgium
would have gone out. I don't believe their votes were stitched and nothing has happened to make me believe that."
On the other hand, there have been plenty of critics who have hit out at Anson’s performance as the Chief Executive. One such figure has been Alec McGiven. Alec was in charge of the unsuccessful bid that England put in for the
2006 World Cup, a competition that was awarded to Germany in the end rather than England. Alec has come out in the aftermath of FIFA’s latest decision and termed Anson and his team as naïve about the whole process of voting. McGiven had earlier on offered
to help the 2018 bid team with the politics of voting in FIFA but they had promptly refused his advice.
Alec McGiven spoke to the press saying, "I'm really sorry to say this but I think he (Anson) has been incredibly naïve. This bid has got one vote in addition to the English vote. I can only believe that he was taken in by the smiles
and the handshakes. After the Panorama programme he was saying these are our friends, this is a brotherhood of friends, he was taken in by friendship and interpreting that as support. Of course, people are sometimes just being polite to your face. That doesn't
necessarily mean they're going to vote for you."
He went onto say, "Strange as it may seem, I've never met Andy Anson. I offered several times, as did members of my team, to help them off the record, privately behind the scenes. They looked at us with disdain because we did so
badly. Well we got five votes, this bid got two. If only they'd just thought about it a little bit more. We went through all of this; we know this is not a straightforward process."
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