It seems a little odd to be carving up football’s biggest events over a decade before they’re due to happen, but that’s football now – the World Cup final attracts over 1.3 billion viewers worldwide, not to mention the massive income the host nation can earn from tourism and the incentive for the more low profile hosts of guaranteed qualification. It’s beginning to seem harder to win the rights to host the tournament than it is to win the trophy itself. Not that you would think so based on the last two winning bids.

Brazil were the only country to make an official bid for the 2014 tournament after Columbia withdrew and an Argentinian bid never materialised. South Africa’s preparations for the 2010 tournament have been hampered by doubts as to whether the stadia and transport links will be completed in time. It is no coincidence that the end of FIFA’s ill fated rotation policy has coincided with a massive increase in potential bidders this time around. It is a policy that was conceived with good intentions but has resulted in limiting competition for tournaments which has lowered the general standards of bids and coerced nations in to showing interest when there was none.

Brazil are a prime example – a nation with a greater population than that of all the other South American nations combined who were viewed as the country most capable of sustaining a bid for the tournament, and it has been one beset with problems. Its stadiums are dilapidated (the legendary Maraccana in particular), its transport links inadequate and its league awash with corruption. FIFA have attempted to avoid Europe dominating the bidding process by making countries from the continent that have hosted the last tournament ineligible for the next two. Perhaps this is the best solution. The tournament will still rotate, but there will be more competition and the tournament will be better for it.

It would be a huge surprise if one of the European bids didn’t succeed. By 2022 it will have been 16 years since Germany hosted the event, and for the continent that is used to getting its own way and has all the money and all the players, that is long enough – especially as a European nation has never won a World Cup outside of the continent. I suspect that given the uncertainty regarding the two upcoming tournaments, FIFA will vote for safety and give the 2018 event to a safe pair of hands and the 2022 event to one of football’s emerging markets such as Australia, Indonesia or the USA. If the last century was about Europe and South America, this may well be about Asia, Africa and North America. Sepp Blatter has already stated that given that both the 2010 and 2014 events will be held in the southern hemisphere Australia would be well advised to concentrate on the 2022 event, and as victory for a European bid in 2018 would mean ineligability for 2022, the USA might be wise to look towards Australia, Japan, Indonesia and South Korea as their main rivals.

Speaking about the USA’s bid, Sunil Gilati, president of the US Soccer Federation, said that

We are determined to finish what we started in 1994. We are the most diversified nation in the world.

If Nigeria and Ghana played each other, it would sell out. If Australia played Costa Rica, it would sell out. When we staged a third-placed play-off between Sweden and Bulgaria in 1994 there were 85,000 people there. My point is that this is not a question of fearing any country. We think we’d have a great bid, great structure and a great landscape.’ In response to the obvious claims from critics that the tournament has no place in a country with no natural market for football, their argument appears to be this – we have a population comprising of people from hundreds of different countries worldwide, they may not support MLS, but they support football. Whether Australia would be happy to be part of the USA’s display of global representation rather than holding the tournament themselves is debatable.

However in recent years we have seen how much FIFA enjoy playing God. If it was simply a case of choosing the country that would put on the biggest and glitziest show, there wouldn’t be many candidates. But it isn’t. FIFA want a country to host it that really needs it, where it will leave a legacy and increase the popularity of the game. As England found when their campaign for the 2006 bid failed so spectacularly, delusions of grandeur can send a bid to its knees – just look at how quickly they have tried to dismiss their early favourites tag this time after their ‘football is coming home’ pitch crashed and burned so catastrophically in Zurich in 2006. Australia may only have only five stadiums which meet FIFA’s requirement at present whilst the USA can boast over twenty, but their decision will be made on the basis of which bid they like, not whether either nation could host an event with a week’s notice. It is for this reason that the bidding process takes place so far before the opening ceremony commences. It seems like common sense, but FIFA has shown itself to have evolved with the times since the turn of the century, taking a few risks along the way – firstly by taking the tournament to Asia for the first time, then to Africa, also for the first time, despite concerns regarding crime, infrastructure and stadia.

If the USA want to win either tournament they need to focus on how far football has come there since 1994 rather than how much they have built. They need to remove any sense of self coronation as ‘the only choice’ and come up with a bid that portrays a nation hungry for football and, in many ways, convince the world that they are wrong about the American game. Justified or not, there is a sense that if football was going to take off then it would have happened by now. That is another article entirely, but it is something the USA must deal with when they compete with countries such as Japan and South Korea where popularity is growing at a phenomenal rate. Is the basis of this bid going to be that the USA can provide best canvas for the world’s footballing talent, or that they want to spark base interest in the game at home? Will the precedent of 1994 work in their favour or against them? It will be a fascinating process, and once which I will write about again when the bids begin to take shape.