The best will fight for the main thing – Newspaper Kommersant No. 140 (7341) of 08/04/2022

For the right to host the 2030 FIFA World Cup, two main football continents – Europe and South America – will compete. The group application of Spain and Portugal, which they filed a year ago, will be opposed by a block of four countries: Uruguay, Argentina, Paraguay and Chile. This rivalry continues the trend of joint bids that has gained momentum in the past decade and is actively welcomed by the International Football Federation (FIFA).

Another participant in the competition for the right to host the 2030 FIFA World Cup has been determined. Portugal and Spain, representing the European continent, will fight the South American bloc consisting of Uruguay, Argentina, Paraguay and Chile.

Latest filed application this Wednesday. Its motto, said Alejandro Dominguez, president of the South American Football Confederation (CONMEBOL), during an official ceremony at the Centenario Stadium in Montevideo, is “to return the World Cup to its original home.”

The final match of the World Cup, if Uruguay, Argentina, Paraguay and Chile win the elections, is planned to be held in Montevideo. It was there that in 1930 the first world championship was held, in which only 13 countries participated. After that, Uruguay, remaining among the strongest teams, received the status of the owner of the championship only once – in 1950.

Competing with the countries of South America will be Spain and Portugal, who filed a group application in June last year. It was called the “Iberian Candidacy”. In fact, in 2018, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez spoke about the proposed submission of a collective application by three countries at once – Spain, Morocco and Portugal, but Morocco later refused to participate in the general project and is now considering the possibility of applying on its own.

Joint applications can be called the trend of this century, but they have not reached such a scale, involving the participation of four states.

In 2002, the right to host the World Cup was divided between two Asian countries – Japan and South Korea. The 2026 World Cup will be hosted by three countries: Canada, Mexico and the United States.

This trend is widely welcomed by the International Football Federation, as collective applications allow minimizing the cost of preparing the tournament for individual states. It cannot be ruled out that Qatar, which spent a total of about $200 billion on the 2022 World Cup, will be the last state to host the competition alone.

Until recently, football had a completely different system for choosing the host country – the so-called principle of rotation of the continents, which FIFA first introduced to avoid disputes at the 1958 World Cup in Sweden. In accordance with this scheme, the world championship was alternately, until 2002, hosted by countries of only three continents – Europe, as well as North and South America. Then Asia was added to the list, and then the African continent – in 2010 the World Cup was held in South Africa.

However, in 2007, the FIFA executive committee refused such a format for choosing the hosts of the tournament. It was opposed by European countries, outraged by the fact that they get a chance to host the world championship only once every 24 years. Then it was decided that from 2018 the opportunity to apply to host the main four-year football tournament will be provided to any country, with the exception of the states of those confederations where the previous two world championships were held.

Ekaterina Remizova