Football associations unite against Fifa’s World Cup plans

0:00Hello, I'm Julian Warwicker. Thank you for downloading the BBC World Tonight podcast for Thursday 30th July. Two international football confederations, Europe and North and Central America, have challenged FIFA's plans to privatise the World Cup, with UEFA saying they'll boycott it if the plans go ahead. Where does this leave the FIFA boss Gianni Infantino? As the fires burning on Heathland in Suffolk grow, we hear from the National Trust about managing their land during extreme heat and what they'd like government to do. And what qualities are required to become the next Secretary-General of the United Nations?

0:38And are any of the five candidates up to the job? Well, three days ago, Gianni Infantino said of FIFA's critics that they should meditate, pray or watch a football match instead of spreading hate and false rumours. Things have moved on a little since then. At this moment, the next men's football World Cup in 2030 faces a boycott by European nations' members of UEFA if the world governing body FIFA moves forward with a plan to sell stakes in its competitions to private investors. UEFA's boycott would cover all FIFA competitions and it's a stance that will be tested as soon as October when the women's World Cup play-offs are due to be held.

1:21Laura McAllister is a former Wales international footballer and now serves as a vice president of UEFA.

1:28David Bernstein:We had to issue a threat that is real and that is commensurate with the seriousness of the threat to football. And that's why we've raised the issue of a boycott and that's why there was unanimity and support for it. But nobody wants to boycott tournaments. And by the way, it's not just England who are playing in playoffs this autumn. All of the home countries are. And my own country, Wales, you know, I'm a former Wales international. This would be our first qualification for a World Cup. So nobody wants for our teams not to be able to play in the most prestigious competitions. But it's not our fault that we've been pushed into this position by some crazy and irresponsible interventions by FIFA.

2:06And there's support from elsewhere for UEFA's position, CONCACAF, which covers North and Central America and represents 41 member nations of FIFA, has also rejected the sell-off proposal. And there's disappointment, too, from the Asian Football Confederation, who've criticised a lack of consultation before the plans entered the public domain. Well, I've been speaking to Kieran Maguire, who's an Associate Professor in Football Finance at the University of Liverpool and also presents the Price of Football podcast. I began by asking about FIFA's proposal and specifically where the money would go.

2:42David Bernstein:Well, FIFA's proposal was to set up a separate company, which would be responsible for its commercial arm. And they were going to allow private investors to acquire 20 % of that company for a fee in the region of$10 billion, which would then be distributed to FIFA's 211 members, giving them somewhere in the region of$45 to$50 million each. Gianni Infantino clearly thought this was a good idea and presumably didn't think he'd get this level of backlash. Why did he get this wrong, do you think? Well, I think that there has been some integrity issues in terms of the way that Infantino has taken a rather autocratic approach to running FIFA.

3:33David Bernstein:There has been political interference, the introduction of the hydration breaks, the sort of crowbarring in of Cristiano Ronaldo and rescinding of red cards for an American player after discussion with President Trump. So that had irritated many other people in football, but they were prepared to tolerate this. The fact that this proposal appears to have been negotiated personally by Gianni Infantino with no consultation to the federations, no communication to the individual football association. They first found out about it when it was leaked and reported in the Times and the Financial Times has angered people.

4:19David Bernstein:and also the fact that as far as the players and their employers, who are the football clubs, are concerned, they acknowledge that football players want to wear the shirt and the badge rather than make money for private equity. Because we are talking about, aren't we, a not-for-profit association. That's what FIFA is registered as. It has charitable status. So in the minds of many, this goes against that. Yes, there does appear to be an inconsistency and FIFA always insists that the countries hosting the World Cup, which normally loses money, if you look to see what happened at Qatar, probably lost$100 billion.

4:59David Bernstein:Certainly Russia, Brazil, South Africa were all significantly loss-making. But it says we are a charity, so therefore we don't pay any tax on the money that we generate from the FIFA World Cup. And the host countries go along with that because they acknowledge that charitable status. Similarly, in Switzerland, where FIFA is based itself, if FIFA is now trying to maximise returns for private equity, high net worth individuals, sovereign wealth funds and pension funds, that completely changed that arrangement. So UEFA says we'll boycott if this goes ahead. CONCACAF now says they don't like it either.

5:38The Asian Football Federation is dubious.

5:41David Bernstein:Where does this go, do you think? Well, if you take a look at the latest pronouncement by Gianni Infantino, he appears to be backtracking and saying, hey, guys, it was just an idea. It was just a suggestion. At the same time earlier today, he was very much emphasizing that acceptance of the deal was worth$40 million. And if you didn't accept it, you were lucky to get$10 million over the next four years. Now, some people might say that he was using this monetary advantage to try to persuade people to vote in favour. I think the way that it's going to go is that he's going to have to backtrack further.

6:22David Bernstein:And perhaps he needs to reconsider whether or not this is going to be a proposal at all, because he's up for re-election very soon. and he needs to get over 50 % of the 211 votes, of which he was very certain until the start of this week. I mean, even the English FA was going to vote in favour of him. I think now that that's no longer guaranteed. Football financing expert Kieran Maguire. We're listening to that. David Bernstein, former chairman of the Football Association and of Manchester City. David, good evening to you. Good evening. What do you make of UEFA's stance on this this evening? Oh, I support it.

7:01absolutely I think the actions of Infantino and FIFA are beyond the pale this match has so many faults, it's arrogant these threats about paying money or not paying money are really forms of always bribery I put it as strongly as that so for a whole load of reasons and Kieran explains some of them very well I'm absolutely supportive of you and I'm pleased, very pleased of course that our FA is alongside them 55 member nations, all of them, have come down on the same side on this. Is that a rarity within UEFA? Yes, indeed. It's very, very unusual. It's very good to see on this particular issue because within the 55, there's all sorts of different economics and situations.

7:51And it is pretty unusual for the wall to see the same thing the same way. In fact, when I spoke out about 10 years ago against Seb Blatter's re-election or coronation as president of FIFA, out of 200 national scientists, about 190 voted for him and against my proposal, including most of UEFA. So things have changed quite a bit since then. Can this plan still happen, do you think, without UEFA? No, I did think so. I think the pressure from UEFA and from CONCACAF possibly, and maybe others, is too great. I think he is very much at the moment between a rock and a hard place, between UEFA on one side and the football world, and on the other side, the Trump interests, which must never be underrated, the master of the deal, and so on.

8:46but no I don't think this was going to happen I wouldn't be surprised if we see Infantino backing off gradually of course this could be voted down by the national societies you know out of the 200 presumably if over half go against it then it would go down any case frankly he may be very pleased if that happens at the end of the day he may give him a way out 211 I think in total isn't it who will make the decision would you expect most of the African nations to support it because they might look upon this and think financially we will benefit from it. Possibly. I wouldn't like to predict how a vote would go.

9:25You've got very powerful South Americans as well. You don't know quite where they're coming from. So I wouldn't like to predict it, but you get to a situation where Infantino may realise he's made a dreadful mistake and being voted down by his own constituency might be the best thing for him. What does this say about the game more broadly? And those who are waiting to criticise the sport because of the money and because of elements that make it look just frankly a little bit grubby, it doesn't help that image, does it? No, it doesn't. It really doesn't. I mean, some of the happenings of the World Cup in the same way didn't help the image.

10:06But we can't just blame FIFA for that. We look at our own game in this country. the huge amounts of money being thrown around. When I was chairman of Manchester City, we were a public company. We had over 2 ,000, I think 3 ,000 fans as shareholders. And we had an AGM and the shareholders had time to ask questions, a challenge and so on. It was very democratic. They didn't control the club, but they had real influence over it. This is, of course, completely lacking now in English football. fans are very rarely there are one or two exceptions but very rarely shareholders anymore I just wonder whether this might be a route the FIFA could go down it sounds very radical but if they floated as a public company and took on board hundreds of thousands of shareholders all over the world they could raise huge amounts of money they could become much more democratic much more fan friendly and probably would have a much higher level of governance David thank you very much for coming on David Bernstein, former chairman of the Football Association and of Manchester City.

11:10Coming up later on the programme, the chair of the Defence Select Committee, Tan Desi, has told me that the government needs to make a stronger commitment to meeting its defence spending targets.

11:21David Bernstein:It's not good enough that government actually kicks the can down the road and leaves it to a future parliament or a future government to deal with this. The threat is here are now. We as a nation must prepare and we must make the adequate investment within defence now. If we don't, if we just all backload everything, then it would lead to defence inflation and we would not get full bang for our buck. A lot of that British taxpayer money will actually be eaten up by defence inflation. Now, when trying to convey the scale of the wildfire burning on Dunwich Heath in Suffolk this morning, it was described as covering an area the size of 14 football pitches.

12:0014 has become more than 200 as of this evening. That's 150 hectares. More than 100 firefighters are trying to contain it and helicopters have been picking up seawater and dropping it on the flames. Suffolk's chief fire officer says there are approximately 100 to 150 people who've been evacuated from their accommodation. And in the village of At Sulton, people shared their experiences of the last few hours. Between 9.30, 10 o 'clock and midnight, we were able to find places for 46 people, five dogs and a cat, children as young as two, elderly people and some disabled people, but they were literally absorbed into the community.

12:43We know how fun all the people must feel. The sea's on one side, there's one single road, and, you know, there's massive heath that's an inferno, so I think it's very, very worrying. We've been at the beach, tried to get back into the road where Cliff House Holiday Park is, and obviously the roads were shut. We were concerned, obviously our dog was in the lodge where we were staying at my mother-in-law's property. The police were absolutely brilliant. They went in and got the dog for us. Obviously he was very nervous, smelt the smoke, and we could see obviously all the smoke in the air, and even the moon had changed colour because obviously it was really bright last night, and the air was just thick of smoke, and you're like, oh my God, what is happening?

13:21It's just like a tinderbox, absolutely everywhere. And obviously the worst fears were confirmed. So it was really scary, really scary. Well, Andy Beer is Chief Operating Officer at the National Trust, which owns almost 250 ,000 hectares of land across England, Wales and Northern Ireland, including an area close to where the fire is burning in Suffolk. So how does that site look to him? Pretty devastating, if I'm honest. So it's a really, really special place, Dunwich Heath and the adjoining land managed by RSPB. and we've lost a lot of it in the fire. So that's very upsetting. We have to remember, of course, the first thing is that everybody's safe.

13:59Nobody's been hurt. Most property's been protected. But for the wildlife and landscape that people love, it's pretty severe. And so obviously people are really upset about that. And lost for a long time, clearly. Yeah, we've had fires on other heathlands, for example, in Purbeck, in Dorset previously, and you don't know how long it's going to take to recover until we get some rain and the vegetation starts to recover. But clearly in summer, this is a really important place for wildlife. And when you get such an extensive fire, then one worries about how long it's going to take to recover. So it's more likely to be years, and it could be a decade or two before it recovers to its former state.

14:37Obviously, the emergency services are doing their best in that fire. But when you look around the country, again, from the National Trust's point of view, and you own a lot of land around the UK, How bad does it look just now? Well, everybody's on tenterhooks. We had a big fire on the Isle of Wight on our land. I think we've had a couple of hundred fires across different landowners in the country. And it's been, it hasn't rained for 40 or 50 days in some places. So we're at a sort of severe fire risk alert. And one can't help but look over the water to the continent and see how things are there.

15:09So yes, we're sort of hopeful for a bit of rain. And that couple of hundred figure, how does that compare with previous years? We've had more fires and more severe fires. And I think the reality is, is that this feels like the new normal that we're going to have to deal with this kind of warm, dry spring, hot summers. This is really causing us to think quite deeply about how we adapt and plan for this kind of thing going forward. And we're also talking to government and say we need to stop thinking about this as a nature problem or a landscape problem. It's a sort of critical national infrastructure a problem that we need to respond to.

15:45Let's get into that in a bit more detail, if we may. I mean, land management, for example, which is where the National Trust comes in, what can you as an organisation do to mitigate at least some of this? Firstly, there's a natural solutions approach, so let nature do a job for you. So we're doing a lot of work in the uplands to make them hold and store water, and that's a big defence against fire risk like that. Landscapes like Dunwich, You need to cut fire breaks and communicate effectively to visitors. And we've got community fire wardens in many places. Thirdly, we need to plan for an event when it happens.

16:22So we've got really strong relationships with emergency services around that kind of thing. So there's how you manage the landscape in the first place, how you deal with emergencies when they arise. But we'll also have to think in the long term, if our climate, as it looks like, is changing permanently, we will have to review and update our approaches on the basis of what we've learned this year. And that brings me to your message to government. What do you say to government about what they do and what they say about climate change? Irrespective of the politics of it, climate change is not an abstract thing.

16:55It's a here and now thing and we need to adapt to it. We also need to stop making the situation worse by trying to bear down on the emissions that are causing the problem in the first place. So one of my colleagues in another organisation talked about the importance of it's not just mopping up the floor, it's also stopping the leak in the first place. We need to think of this as a thing that cuts across government and across society rather than being something that sits in the environment box, if you see what I mean. Is there anything in the immediate future that you might want government to do as a result of what we are seeing now?

17:29What I would say is that the emergency response we've seen has been absolutely fantastic. So we've seen the best of people in their response. So I wouldn't want to criticise anybody who's been involved in the response. But I think what we realise is the problem is perhaps a lot bigger. And what we're seeing in France and Spain at the moment is these things are really extensive in their scale. And we need to think about them as big long-term plans. This is only going to get more severe over the next 25 years. This is a little warning for us. And so I think a concerted plan to deal with either too much water, too little water, too much heat or extreme wind, which we've also had affecting our places, is a really important thing for us all to get behind.

18:11Andy Beer of the National Trust. Well, the fire in Suffolk is part of a much bigger story this summer about heat and rainfall or lack of it. Seven areas of England were officially declared to be in drought yesterday, and today a drought was announced covering the whole of Wales. The Environmental Body National Resource Wales said the decision had been made in response to record low river levels, dry soils, widespread wildfires and mounting impacts on wildlife, farming and forestry. The nation's health and well-being is taking a hit too. According to estimates from the UK Health Security Agency, England this year is on track to record the highest number of heat-related deaths since records began.

18:55And those persistent high temperatures are a particular challenge for those who can't go anywhere to get away from them, people who are homeless or sleeping rough. Francesca Albanese is the Executive Director of Policy and Social Change at the homelessness charity Crisis. Francesca, welcome. Good evening. Good evening. We think of homeless people struggling most in the depths of the winter, but what's it like when it's so hot and so dry? Yeah, I mean, it's really relentless in this hot weather for people that are sleeping rough. And, you know, when you're already kind of, you know, if you're experiencing rough sleeping, you're already more likely to have health conditions like lung disease and heart conditions.

19:40And the hot weather just makes it so much worse and so much more dangerous. and you know many of us can go into an air-conditioned office or you know go inside when we have this type of heat that we're experiencing at the moment but if you're homeless and particularly when you're sleeping you can't do that you have no other choice but to be outside so you know suffering on a hot pavement not being able to have any shade and I think the other thing you know we often take for granted is we you know we have access to water and running water when you're inside. When you're homeless and you have very little money, you know, one, you don't have access to water, but you can't afford to buy it either.

20:20And so we're seeing, you know, kind of increased risk of dehydration, heat exhaustion and heat stroke, you know, for many people who are forced, unfortunately, to be rough sleeping at the moment. What help are you able to offer people in this situation? So at crisis, our services, alongside many others, up and down the country you know we are helping people by giving out water sunscreen hats and also making sure that people can come into our services during the day so obviously you know being allowed being able to come in um from from the heat um and so but you know that is um temporary respite you know we're able to do as much as we can but really um you know what we need is a lot more kind of concerted effort around being able to help people properly um you know being able to access emergency accommodation is really vital.

21:13And there's some areas where that is the case, but, you know, it isn't everywhere. And also it's only for short periods of time. What of the government's role here? Should they be making more provisions for homeless people when it's extremely hot, particularly as we now have a government led by a man who says he wants to end rough sleeping? Yeah, I mean, obviously it was very positive to hear that last week from the Prime Minister, you know, that pledge to end rough sleeping. And it really does start with kind of the here and now. So one of the things we want to make sure happens is it's mandatory so that when extreme weather is called, so whether that's cold weather or hot weather, that local authorities have the resources, you know, to be able to put on emergency accommodation and bring people in off the streets.

21:59And, you know, that is something that could really help kind of in the immediate term, I think. But one of the issues is obviously what we want is to make sure there are less people rough sleeping. in the first place so you you know you aren't forced into that position and i think you know there's a real kind of you know positivity at the moment around what can be done um but that is definitely about tackling some of the root causes so um you know we don't have enough social homes and we need to make sure we invest more in in kind of um solutions at work particularly when we're talking about rough sleeping that's about the right support for people and you know we can you know there are real opportunities to get that right okay thank you very much for coming on the programme Francesca Albanese of crisis.

22:40The main headlines so far on the world tonight. European football's 55 member associations have voted to boycott the World Cup if a proposed deal to sell stakes in it to private investors goes ahead. Diane Abbott has been readmitted by Labour a year after she was suspended for comments about racism. And the UK Health Security Agency estimates that the number of heat-related deaths in England has nearly doubled this summer compared with last year. Now, a data breach that exposed the personal details of thousands of Afghans applying to come to the UK to flee the Taliban was a foreseeable failure.

23:19That's according to a parliamentary inquiry. The report published today from the Commons Defence Committee said the Ministry of Defence had lacked the expertise to run the Afghan relocation scheme put in place after the fall of Kabul in August 2021 and used secrecy as a shield against proper accountability, secrecy in the form of a super injunction lasting two years. The report also said nearly 900 Afghans who worked for the British military were wrongly refused relocation to the UK and faced years of danger, delay and uncertainty. Well, I've been speaking to one of those 18 ,500 people whose private information was leaked by the Ministry of Defence.

24:03He was an Afghan civil servant who worked alongside British and US forces during the years prior to the return to power of the Taliban. Honestly, I'm shocked by the systemic failure because it does not only put those at risk who are currently stuck in the country. I mean, their situation, I can only imagine how hard it is for them, for the Afghans, I mean, who are stuck in Afghanistan. The second part, I am a situation, I live in the UK right now. This means I will not be able to go in the near future to Afghanistan because I don't know where my information is, who has access to my information and how it's going to affect me and my family members back home.

24:48So yeah, I'm very shocked. When you first became aware of the leak. What was your reaction? What went through your mind at that point? The first thing I was telling my wife and kids that, OK, this means no more going back to Afghanistan. It was completely out of the question at that point because of what you feared the Taliban knew. Exactly. We left Afghanistan because we knew Taliban were against us. But then to have entire information about me and I don't know how much do they have on that information. So now it means that the Taliban have that as soon as we go enter, we might be arrested, we might be, you know, up on arrival.

25:31So that meant that we would not be able to go back. What now then, from your point of view, not just about your own circumstances and trying to find out more. But how does it leave those back in Afghanistan who you know, who are associated with you in some shape or form? What are the risks there? My family members, my friends or people who are being affected, their family members, their friends, they're all at risk of being arrested, at risk of being questioned. And Taliban have used before the tactic of, you know, forcing your return by imprisoning one of your relatives. One other aspect of this whole story that's emerged via this report today is a reference to the British government's, as they call it, self-move policy, which is basically available to vulnerable Afghans who want to move, but they would have to fund and arrange their own travel out of Afghanistan.