Sepp Blatter assures Russia will not be stripped of the 2018 World Cup, calling England “bad losers.”
The tournament was awarded to Russia in 2010, with England also submitting a bid, but subsequent allegations of corruption have led to calls for the decision to be reassessed.
“You will never lose the World Cup,” Blatter told Russian news agency TASS.
“There will be no change in the World Cup.
“England? Bad losers. In Great Britain they created this beautiful game, they introduced fair play.
Sepp Blatter assures Russia will not be stripped of the 2018 World Cup, calling England “bad losers.”
The tournament was awarded to Russia in 2010, with England also submitting a bid, but subsequent allegations of corruption have led to calls for the decision to be reassessed.
“You will never lose the World Cup,” Blatter told Russian news agency TASS.
“There will be no change in the World Cup.
“England? Bad losers. In Great Britain they created this beautiful game, they introduced fair play.
“But there was only one vote going for England. They were eliminated in the first round. Nobody wanted to have England.
“In 2010 we had a discussion about World Cup and then we came to a double decision. For the World Cups it was agreed that we’d go to Russia because it’s never been in Russia or Eastern Europe, and for 2022 we’d go back to America.
“And so we’d have the World Cup in the two biggest political powers. Everything was good until the moment when [former French President Nicolas] Sarkozy had a meeting with the crown prince of Qatar, who is now the ruler of Qatar [Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani].
“At a lunch afterwards he told [UEFA President Michel] Platini it would be good to go to Qatar. This changed everything.
“There was an election by secret ballot. Four votes from Europe went away from the USA and so the result was 14 to eight. With the four votes, it would have been twelve to ten.
“If the USA had been given the World Cup, we would only be speaking about the wonderful World Cup 2018 in Russia and we would not speak about any problems at FIFA.”
Blatter also attempted to explain his payment of two million Swiss Francs to Platini, described by the Swiss attorney general as a “disloyal payment”.
“When he was chairman of the organising committee for the France [1998] World Cup, he told me at the end of the tournament: ‘I would like to work for you.’
“And then he said ‘I am very expensive’. I said ‘okay’. He said, ‘I am worth one million a year.’
“I said ‘I cannot pay this, it’s impossible’. And he said, ‘Okay, then pay me later.’
“So we agreed a contract, where he got some money, but not one million. He was working until he was elected to the FIFA Executive Committee and UEFA Executive Committee in 2002.
“He stopped his working contract because he was then a FIFA official.
“In 2010 he approached the financial director of FIFA saying, ‘Hey, listen, FIFA owes us money.’
“I was informed about that and I said, ‘okay let him make an invoice for what we owe him’.
“Then he said we owed him two million Swiss francs. I analysed that and I said ‘okay’. It’s a contract we had agreed.
“It’s a principle I have in my life that if you owe money to somebody, then you pay it. So we paid it. That’s all. This money was not paid for any other reasons.”