Didn't see this much outrage before the churnalists came out with the corruption scandals
Seems this is only such a big deal now its stopped England hosting the World Cup.
To be honest, for a lot of people it's nothing to do with England loosing the bid, the 2018 bid could have gone to any of the countries and a good case could be made for each, both for footballing and economic reasons, I personally think that 2018 should have gone to either Spain or England as they would host the best tournament IMO, but Holland/Belgium and Russia wouldn't be a million miles behind that, so in honesty it could have gone to any of the four and none would have been a travesty.
The one that upsets me is the 2022 decision, Qatar is an absolute joke of a decision, Australia is the obvious choice as they have a growing league and they have never had it before. If you want to "grow" football that would have been the obvious choice. The USA and Korea would have been good choices also on this basis, they are both massive developing markets for football, despite the fact that both have had it relatively recently would also "grow" football in their regions massively. So this we did it to "grow football" argument is clearly the biggest load of old drivel i've ever heard.
The US member not even bothering to vote for his own bid is just making it blatantly obvious of the levels of corruption in FIFA, Platini who spends all his time bemoaning money in football follows the money to Qatar, surely his position at UEFA must be under question if he persues his quest against money in the game when he will vote for a country where in a desperate attempt to try to attract half decent players will pay people with less ability than Darius Vassell 100k per week.
At least man City pay players like Tevez who is world class insane amounts of money, and Yaya Toure who is a top class international.
I'm not bitter about england not getting it as i could make a case for any of the countries bidding for 2018 to get the tournament, ours and Spains considerably stronger but not decicively stronger than the other two.
EDIT -
Just thought i'd mention, very good point made by Ian Holloway on goals on sunday (hard to admit for a Bristol City fan) why are we even allowed to speak to the ExCo members ? as he said they should be locked away in a room, you can get very detailed independent reports about the bids of each country and they then make the decisions based on that, not on who schmoozes them the most, not on what Beckham says to them, not on how much money people stuff in brown envelopes, they should have little to no contact with officials from the bidding countries.
