Thu, 29/05/2008 - 08:40
Events | United States | Football Soccer
The United States looks set to bid against England for the 2018 World Cup with US Soccer President, Sunil Gulati, saying: “We will be making a decision in the next two or three months, but we are looking very seriously at it.I can't think of any reasons why we wouldn't bid for the tournament.”
“We've done this before and been successful at doing it before. The bid process has become very competitive and whether playing a game in Trinidad has anything to do with that I am not sure. But I think the FA are more sophisticated than to think they are going to get Jack Warner's vote on the back of playing one game. There aren't any Concacaf bidders at this point, and Mr Warner is the president of Concacaf."
While Major League Soccer is only slowly coming to prominence, Gulati is confident that all rival bids from Europe can be deflected. "Clearly England will have a very strong bid, Spain and Germany would be formidable candidates," he said. "But we are going to focus on the quality in the US. There is no country in the world in a better position in terms of stadium facilities and size than us.
"We have got 50 stadia of 70,000 capacities capable of hosting the World Cup. We could have hosted the competition in 1998 in stadiums that didn't even exist in 1994, and the same goes for 2002 and not use any stadiums that existed in 1998.
Gulati also suggested that the Community Shield, the traditional curtain-raiser to the new season, could be held in the US in the future. Such a plan would reopen the furious debate over the Premier League's controversial scheme to play a 39th league match abroad, though it remains a possibility attractive to the American game.
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