It has emerged that the special investigator FIFA hired to examine the 2022 World Cup bidding process, Michael Garcia, has found plenty of evidence that political influence played a part in some executive committee members' voting.
Of course, that's not exactly news. Platini himself revealed that Nicolas Sarkozy, then president of France, asked him to vote for Qatar at the time, though the UEFA president says he would have chosen them anyway.
Beyond that, it's pretty obvious that FAs and national governments are very closely intertwined. They don't just do what's good for football, they do what's good for football in their country -- which is often a short step away from simply doing what's good for their country. And who better than their elected presidents, prime ministers, emirs, supreme leaders, kings and emperors to tell them what's good for their country and what is their patriotic duty?
In theory, though, that's illegal. FIFA statutes very clearly forbid governments from interfering into the footballing decisions of FAs. Nations have been banned for what FIFA calls political interference.
So, effectively, Blatter could find himself in a situation where he notes that a significant portion -- or even the majority -- of the ExCo which awarded the 2022 and 2018 World Cups did so because they were influenced politically by their governments. And that, by FIFA rules, is illegal.
Illegal enough to invalidate the entire bidding process and re-assign the World Cup to another nation? Maybe. Especially given the fact that Blatter himself was never a Qatar booster, but rather a backer of the United States bid.
Ordinarily you wouldn't even contemplate this option. But when you look at who the major power players and stakeholders out there are and you look at what they want and you consider that some ?promises? that some folks might have made back in 2022 may now already be fully paid up... well, it's not something you'd want to rule out.
Stranger things have happened. Like awarding a summer World Cup to a country of 600,000 people with insanely hot June temperatures.
), Anfield, Stamford Bridge, The Emirates, the Olympic Stadium... the list goes on and on. A World Cup in England would rock - you know it as well as I do - and there would be no problems with heat or switching the World Cup, which has always been held in the summer, to the winter!
