Pros versus cons: Why Australia will likely never host a FIFA World Cup
- Grant McLachlan
- Jun 12
- 8 min read
The stadiums are built, the fans would come, and the sums could be made to work — the obstacle is the bidding process itself.
Australia has hosted two Olympic Games and will stage a third in Brisbane in 2032. It has hosted five Commonwealth Games, two Rugby World Cups, multiple Cricket World Cups, an annual Grand Slam tennis tournament, and a round of the Formula One world championship every year since 1985. Yet the one event that towers over them all — the FIFA World Cup — has never come closer to Australia than a single, possibly sympathetic, vote in a Zurich ballroom in 2010.
The conventional explanations — too remote, wrong time zone, not really a football nation — do not survive contact with the evidence, least of all after Australia and New Zealand filled their grounds for the 2023 Women’s World Cup.
The real questions are harder.
Knowing what it now knows about how FIFA awards its showpiece, could Australia ever again trust the process? And — awkwardly for readers on this side of the Tasman — could it trust New Zealand?
Contents
The scale of the prize
No event on earth concentrates so much attention on so few athletes.
The men’s World Cup fields barely 1,100 players, yet it sells around 3.4 million tickets and reaches a cumulative television audience upwards of 3.5 billion — more than a Summer Olympics, which needs nearly ten times as many athletes to get there. The 2026 edition, now under way across the United States, Canada and Mexico, has expanded to 48 teams and 104 matches, stretching the prize — and the price — further still.
Event | Athletes | Live attendance | Global broadcast viewership |
FIFA World Cup (men’s) | 1,104 | ~3.4 million | ~3.5+ billion |
Summer Olympic Games | ~10,500 | ~8–10 million | ~3+ billion |
FIFA Women’s World Cup | ~736 | ~1.97 million | ~2 billion |
Cricket World Cup (ODI men’s) | ~210 | ~1.25 million | ~2.6+ billion |
Rugby World Cup (men’s) | ~660 | ~2.4 million | ~850+ million |
Commonwealth Games | ~4,500–5,000 | ~1.3–1.5 million | ~1+ billion |
That asymmetry is the whole story.
A tournament this valuable makes governments do extraordinary things to win it — and made the 24 men who used to award it extraordinarily valuable themselves.
Forty-six million dollars, one vote
Australia’s tilt at the 2022 tournament had everything a textbook bid requires.
The federal government committed $45.6 million to fund the campaign. Frank Lowy chaired it, Quentin Bryce and Elle Macpherson fronted it, and both sides of federal politics backed it. When the AFL and NRL baulked at surrendering their stadiums for up to eight weeks, a government-brokered memorandum of understanding in May 2010 smoothed the way — with potential compensation to the rival codes estimated in the hundreds of millions.
None of it mattered.
A McKinsey report commissioned with FIFA’s support had already rated Australia the least profitable of the five 2022 bidders — 68 per cent against the United States’ benchmark of 100.
On 2 December 2010, FIFA’s executive committee eliminated Australia in the first round of voting with a single vote. Qatar won the final round 14–8.
“We did our best and I know we could not have done anything better,” Lowy said.
That was precisely the problem.
Australia spent $45.6 million of public money on a campaign that secured one vote — and the only man who claims to have cast it says he did so to please his daughter.
Sepp Blatter has since claimed that the lone vote was his, cast because his daughter had once worked for Soccer Australia and he could not face telling her otherwise.
Franz Beckenbauer separately implied the vote was his.
Fifteen years on, nobody can say with certainty who Australia’s $45.6 million actually bought.
What the investigations found
The voters themselves fared worse.
The United States Department of Justice indicted a swathe of FIFA officials in 2015, including members of the committee that handed Qatar the tournament, and the bidding race for 2018 and 2022 became the most investigated process in sporting history.
Australia did not emerge spotless either: FIFA’s own ethics committee report in November 2014 cleared Qatar but accused Australia of steering money badged as football development towards countries connected to executive committee members.
The particulars are uncomfortable reading.
The Australian Federal Police evaluated a US$500,000 payment the bid made to CONCACAF, supposedly for a centre of excellence in Trinidad and Tobago.
In 2017, Four Corners reported a further $5 million spent on projects in South-East Asia in an apparent effort to win the vote of Thailand’s Worawi Makudi — whom FIFA later suspended over forgery findings, a sanction the Court of Arbitration for Sport overturned.
And Bonita Mersiades, the bid’s head of corporate affairs, reportedly raised concerns about how support was being courted; she was dismissed in January 2010 and later laid out the whole sorry business in her book Whatever It Takes.
The compensation that never came
Then FIFA changed the product after the auction.
When the governing body began canvassing a switch of Qatar 2022 to the northern winter — the bid having been won on a summer prospectus — Lowy wrote to FIFA seeking just and fair compensation for nations that had spent millions bidding for a summer tournament.
FIFA’s response was that there were “no grounds” for compensation, since every bidder had accepted that the schedule could change at FIFA’s behest.
The tournament was duly played in November and December.
The message to future bidders could not have been clearer: you carry all the risk, FIFA keeps all the discretion.
The Dempsey precedent
Australians wondering whether the room can be trusted need only ask New Zealand.
In July 2000, in the final round of voting for the 2006 World Cup, the president of the Oceania Football Confederation — Auckland’s Charlie Dempsey — was under instruction from his confederation to vote for South Africa.
He abstained, and Germany won 12–11.
Had Dempsey voted as directed, the ballot would have tied and Sepp Blatter — who favoured South Africa — held the casting vote.
Helen Clark said she was “extremely disappointed and mystified”; South Africa’s president said the procedure had elements of dishonesty about it.
Dempsey said he had endured “intolerable pressure” in Zurich, including attempted bribes and a hoax letter — slipped under delegates’ doors by the German satirical magazine Titanic — promising cuckoo clocks for votes.
He denied ever taking money, resigned that September, and died in 2008.
But the questions outlived him: in 2015, former German football federation president Theo Zwanziger alleged that Swiss court documents showed US$250,000 flowing to an anonymous recipient marked “E16” on the eve of the vote, and claimed that recipient was Dempsey — while Der Spiegel separately alleged that a German slush fund had been used to buy votes — a claim the German federation categorically rejected.
None of it was ever proven.
All of it is why, when Australians ask whether they can trust the process — including New Zealand’s seat at the table — the history offers no comfort.
The unwritten rotation
There is an unwritten rule, visible in the list of hosts, that the World Cup alternates between Europe and the rest of the world.
It fits. The United States in 1994, France in 1998, Japan and South Korea in 2002, Germany in 2006, South Africa in 2010, Brazil in 2014, Russia in 2018, Qatar in 2022, North America in 2026, and a Spain–Portugal–Morocco tournament with South American centenary matches in 2030.
Look closer, though, and the “rest of the world” hosts share something else: a broadcast-friendly clock. South Africa and Qatar sit in Europe’s time zone; the United States and Brazil serve the football-mad Americas. Australia shares its hours with Japan and South Korea — a slot FIFA has used exactly once.
Blatter eventually said the quiet part aloud.
Interviewed by Mersiades for her book, he said Australia “had no chance” — it was never going to be competitive for broadcasters on time zone or money, and FIFA needed the World Cup to bankroll its next four years.
Football Australia counters that its time zones put it within touching distance of billions of viewers across Asia.
Both things can be true: Asia is the future audience, and Europe still pays the bills.
The Victoria lesson
Even if FIFA came courting, would any Australian government now sign the cheque?
In July 2023, Victoria — of all states — cancelled the 2026 Commonwealth Games it had volunteered to host, with Premier Daniel Andrews declaring that a budgeted $2.6 billion had blown out to as much as $7 billion: all cost and no benefit, in his telling.
Victoria.
The state with the MCG, Marvel Stadium and AAMI Park within a tram ride of each other; the state that stages a grand slam and a grand prix every single year, found a 12-day Commonwealth Games not feasible.
The Victorian Auditor-General’s subsequent report made the episode worse, not better: the withdrawal cost Victorians over $589 million — including a $380 million settlement with the Commonwealth Games parties — with no discernible benefit, and the $6.9 billion figure used to justify cancellation was “overstated and not transparent”.
Now scale that up.
A men’s World Cup demands exclusive control of a dozen stadiums for roughly eight weeks, sidelining the AFL and NRL mid-season, plus the tax exemptions, indemnities and government guarantees FIFA requires of every host.
After Victoria, which premier puts their name to that?
Full stadiums are not the problem
What is emphatically not the problem is demand.
The current tournament has tested how much fans will pay and found astonishing answers: FIFA’s dynamic pricing was charging US$1,940 at face value for an upper-tier seat at the United States’ opening match, while the cheapest resale ticket for the final at MetLife Stadium was listed at US$9,200 in mid-May.
Canadian carrier Air Transat built an entire advertising campaign on the absurdity, running real-time comparisons showing a return flight to England costing less than a quarter of the price of watching England play once.
People paid anyway.
Australia has already run the experiment at home. The 2023 Women’s World Cup, co-hosted with New Zealand, put nearly two million people through the gates — the best-attended women’s tournament ever staged. Filling Australia’s stadiums, and accommodating the visiting fans, was never going to be the issue.
The issue is purely whether Australia can stomach the bidding process.
The locked gate
Australia’s answer, when last asked, was no.
On 4 October 2023, FIFA invited bids for the 2034 World Cup from Asia and Oceania only, giving federations 27 days to declare.
Saudi Arabia announced its bid within minutes.
The Asian Football Confederation’s president immediately pledged the whole confederation’s support, and Indonesia — which had floated a joint bid with Australia — switched sides within a fortnight.
On deadline day, Football Australia withdrew, saying it had taken all factors into consideration, and pivoted to the 2026 Women’s Asian Cup and the 2029 Club World Cup instead.
The arithmetic that follows is brutal.
FIFA’s rotation principles exclude the confederations of the previous two hosts, so a Saudi tournament in 2034 locks Asia — Australia’s confederation — out of 2038 and 2042.
The earliest realistic opening is 2046, more than a third of a century after Zurich. By then, every official who lived through the 2010 humiliation will be long gone. The institutional memory of what the process actually costs — in money, in dignity, in trust — may be gone with them. That might be the only way Australia ever bids again.
Australia can build the stadiums, fill the seats and balance the books. What it has never been willing to do — and what a decade of indictments suggests the World Cup too often required — is to buy the room.
