It used to be said that what was good for General Motors would be good for America. This was not a statement of corporate arrogance but more of an observation that the world's largest company and the world's largest economy had mutual interests.
Until recently I thought a similar goose/gander connection existed between the Premier League and England's bid to stage the 2018 World Cup. A symbiotic win-win if ever there was one.
O to live in such simple times! These days, GM is more likely to bankrupt America than sustain it and the Premier League's commitment to the Football Association-led World Cup campaign is looking increasingly half-hearted.
That is a crying shame because England has everything it takes to stage a superb tournament, as will be demonstrated when the 15 cities hoping to host World Cup football in 2018 come to Wembley on Thursday to deliver their applications.
I had hoped to write only about that this week but to not mention Tuesday's shenanigans at bid HQ would be to ignore that big grey thing, with clumpy feet and a ridiculous schnozzle, lurking in the corner of the room.
I refuse to spend too long on the squabbles of English football's numerous chiefs, though, and not just because I wrote about them last week. The main reason is that they are depressingly trivial: x doesn't like y, y doesn't like z, nobody likes z, but nobody can really remember why.
In case you have no idea what I am on about, Sir Dave Richards, the chairman of the Premier League (among other titles), has chosen this week, the week the 2018 bid team hoped to talk about how many excellent potential venues this country has and the enormous passion for football we share, to resign from the bid's main board.
This week as opposed to two weeks ago, when that board was restructured to streamline the decision-making process, bring in the key powerbrokers and show a united front to the rest of the world, particularly the 24 members of Fifa's executive committee who will vote on which country gets the World Cup next December.
Richards must have missed that memo. Why else would such a loyal servant of English football destabilise an already wobbly situation a fortnight away from the bid's "first interview", the draw for the 2010 World Cup in Cape Town?
Let's hope the bid team insider I spoke to earlier this week is right when he asked me if I had met Richards. "No? Well, him leaving actually makes our job a lot easier," he said.
He's probably right. But then Karren Brady, one of board members who did step down at the correct time, is also probably right when she admitted the bid was beginning to look like a "shambles".
Ho hum, perhaps we did not like being frontrunners. Coming hard on the rails worked for London 2012, after all. Might be an idea to stop yanking on the reins now, though, hey?
So with that in mind, let's turn our attention to the pitches and places we hope will persuade Fifa's sphinx-like electorate to bring football back home.
:Article Source:bbc.co.uk
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