Challenges to ASEAN’s World Cup Bid

In this follow-up to his earlier article, Fuadi Pitsuwan discusses the challenges to ASEAN’s World Cup Bid. A shorter version was published in the Jakarta Post:

Challenges to ASEAN’s 2030 World Cup Bid

By: Fuadi Pitsuwan

The Lombok meeting among ASEAN’s Foreign Ministers concluded recently yielded one of the most euphoric decisions in ASEAN’s 43-year history. The Ministers agreed in principle that ASEAN should bid to host the World Cup in 2030 as a single entity. The ASEAN Secretariat and Malaysia were tasked to work with the ASEAN Football Federation to create a proposal for the leaders’ endorsement at the ASEAN Summit in May. The project will be one of many flagship projects under Indonesian chairmanship in ASEAN in 2011.

ASEAN’s pursuit of the grand dream will be a two-pronged approach: strategic and procedural.

Strategically, this is a way to give real life to our motto: “One Vision, One Identity, One Community.” Submitting a bid will catalyze efforts to further integrate the ASEAN single market. Integration is pivotal for our economic prosperity in an era when a rising China and India are favored destinations for foreign investment. A bid would solidify a critical second identity, ASEANites, for all citizens of ASEAN, much like citizens of Europe. An ASEAN World Cup would be an achievement that years of joint efforts and political communiqués declaring a “sense of community” cannot attain.

Procedurally, ASEAN will devise a practical and realistic strategy to submit a competitive bid. Details must be studied carefully by relevant parties during the next few years. ASEAN will explore what is plausible and what is not. We will have to test the limits of FIFA rules. Novel ideas are needed and must come from officials in charge but also all ASEANites. Our people must work together with enthusiasm, motivation, willing to surmount all difficulties.

The most important premise for a competitive submission will be our ability to operate as a single entity, in 2030. We are qualified to bid as a joint 10-country effort, but to succeed FIFA must be confident that we can function like a single-country host. A less-than-ideal approach is to select a few representative nations who by the time the selection comes around, probably a decade from now, could demonstrate seamless logistical linkage among them. Ultimately, our proposal will not be a “joint” bid, but a bid from a regional grouping with an underlying framework for member states to work as one. We should be treated by the FIFA host selection committee more like a single-country with self-governing sub-states.

We already aim to establish the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) by 2015, which means we will have a 15-year opportunity to practice and perfect our operation as a single market. The Master Plan on ASEAN Connectivity, adopted by the leaders at the 17th ASEAN Summit in October 2010, and extensively discussed again at the recent Foreign Ministers’ meeting in Lombok, will connect ASEAN countries through air, land, and sea transportations. How many member states will end up bidding to represent ASEAN will depend on the commitment of our governments and the strength of our public-private partnerships to achieve such connectivity. Regardless, the World Cup bid is a tangible goal which appeals to all ASEANites and will surely energize the enthusiasm to forge the AEC.

With FIFA’s commitment, as President Sepp Blatter put it, “to keep sending the tournament all over the world,” ASEAN is a viable candidate. Moreover, in response to protests over the selections of Russia and Qatar as hosts for 2018 and 2022 respectively, Sepp Blatter recently remarked “The World Cup will discover new cultures in new regions, and that’s something I’m delighted about.” If we submit the bid as a bloc, the world could witness ten unique cultures in a new region yet to host the World Cup.

A common concern raised by skeptics is the distances between countries. Consider this. The furthest distance between two ASEAN capitals is from Jakarta to Manila and that is about 2,700 kilometers. However, in the 1994 World Cup in the US, the longest distance between two of its stadiums, one located California and another in Massachusetts, are more than 4,300 kilometers apart. In 2014, fans and players will travel more than 3,100 kilometers between Manaus and Porto Alegre, two of Brazil’s proposed venues. Two of Russia’s proposed host cities in 2018, Kaliningrad and Yekaterinburg, are more than 3,000 kilometers apart. Yekaterinburg is only accessible by air due to its remoteness.

Critics also worry about how many countries will be allowed automatic spots in the tournament. Surely, if it is a whole ASEAN bid, not all 10 countries would receive such wild cards. The ASEAN Cup, a biannual event, should be used to determine which one or two best ASEAN teams would get the privileged opportunities.  If less than 10 countries are submitting then a separate tournament should be held internally among the hosts to decide who would be automatically qualified for the world’s tournament. ASEAN countries which do not qualify through the ASEAN Cup, or through competition among the host countries, should have another shot at the Asian Football Confederation-wide qualification rounds. An ASEAN team, comprised of best players from the region, is another consideration gaining momentum, but that requires FIFA to bend its rules.

ASEAN football fans have already been squabbling over who will host the two most-watched games: the opening and the final. FIFA’s rules stipulate that the stadiums hosting those two games have a minimum capacity of 80,000. That should already rule out some cities since building stadiums of that size in addition to supporting accommodation, transportation, security and airport systems require significant financial investment. We also need to factor in the cost associated with holding opening and closing ceremonies. This process should be self selective with a few key host cities to choose.

Elaborating further on cost, participating ASEAN members in the bid will share the price tag of hosting the tournament. This is what makes such a dream possible in the first place. It is unlikely that a single ASEAN country can bear the financial burden alone.  But if 2 or more, or all 10, decide to bid together, with agreements to spread the stadium locations throughout ASEAN, the proposal becomes financially sensible.

Competitions from China and Uruguay-Argentina would be fierce, but they are not insurmountable. China prides itself on large potential fan base. We have that too. By 2030, ASEAN is estimated to be home to more than a billion people. And arguably, we have much stronger football culture than the Chinese. We are already football-mad, but we could be even more so if given the opportunity. We will be required to commit significant investment in infrastructure development in order to compete with the Chinese bid. That, after the tournament, would provide tremendous benefits to the region economically. The ultimate benefit of competing with China though lies in the fact that it would forge a sense of identity among ASEANites. With a common challenge, our people will unite. We will be one.

True, Uruguay and Argentina, if they are successful with their joint bid, would celebrate the 100^th anniversary of the World Cup at the place where the first tournament was held. But what would be the legacy of hosting the World Cup there? Would FIFA really contribute to football development in those two well-established leagues? Is FIFA tapping into a new market?

There would be tremendous rewards along the way, even if we lost the bid in the end. The process from now until the submission of the bid could technically be an end in itself. We are now forced to integrate faster and more robustly. Our connectivity plan needs to be pursued aggressively. The $1-billion ASEAN Infrastructure Fund, also launched last year, will have to be increased in order to lay the infrastructure foundation sufficient to submit a competitive bid. It is a noble challenge for us to connect faster, build better roads, rail tracks, stations, and airports. Let’s see how far we can go.

Don’t forget another key benefit. We are utilizing football as a vehicle to exert our global influence. Our soft power will shine through the world’s most-watched sport which captures the attention of people across cultures, creeds, genders, age groups, income levels, and social statuses.

The world may only be familiar with the “BRIC” countries for now. But in a few years, a new jargon, “BRICA”, i.e. Brazil, Russia, India, China and ASEAN, will be created. Our dream to host the World Cup in 2030 is a catalyst for this.

Fuadi Pitsuwan is an adjunct research scholar at Georgetown University’s Asian Studies Department.

Can ASEAN Host the World Cup in 2030?

My Thai friend and fellow football fan Fuadi Pitsuwan is floating an interesting idea of ASEAN possibly hosting the World Cup as a regional organization in 2030. I am publishing his thought piece on the subject with his permission below.

ASEAN and the World Cup

Fuadi Pitsuwan

ASEAN should host the World Cup in 2030. It is an affirmation that not only football fans in ASEAN but all ASEAN citizens will welcome.

The astounding decision last week by FIFA, the world’s football federation, to award Russia and Qatar to host the World Cup in 2018 and 2022 respectively gives hope that ASEAN should seriously aspire, as a Community, to host this quadrennial sporting event, with the largest worldwide audience, in 2030.

The current FIFA statues stipulate that “tournaments may not be held on the same continent on two successive occasions.”  Qatar, is in the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) together with all 10 ASEAN member states. Unless there is a rule change, e.g. splitting the AFC, which has 46 members, to West and East AFCs, ASEAN is ineligible for 2026.

But there is hope for 2030 (or any World Cup after that).

Despite the fact that no Southeast Asian state has ever reached the World Cup finals ASEAN countries have the potential and the determination to qualify for the finals. Hopefully, this could change before 2030. ASEAN, after all, is home to some of the most fanatical football fans in the world. But Qatar has never qualified for the finals either.

For far too long, football fans all over the region have been staying up pass midnight to watch live games of their favorite teams, whether clubs or foreign nations, on TV. It is time that our fans deserve to watch the World Cup in the comfort of their own region.

With a fast growing middle class and already a major tourism and business destination a World Cup final held in ASEAN will pack in the crowds. Moreover, football fans, like coffee lovers, are not qualified by their age, gender, religion or ethnicity. By 2030, the population of ASEAN which now stands close to 600 million will be close to a billion. That’s your mega base of fans for success.

How exciting it would be if each member state is to provide at least one stadium for the tournament. With the prospect of Timor-Leste joining ASEAN as early as next year as its 11th member, ASEAN could quite easily build 11 brand new stadiums. The bid guideline requires no less than 12 stadiums and 2 of these must have minimum capacities of 80,000 for the opening match and the final, while the rest of the stadiums must have a capacity of more than 40,000 spectators.

FIFA also requires, state-of-the-art telecommunications and transport connectivity and accommodation infrastructure. This is well within our reach to achieve.

I don’t think there will be any other significant collective decision by the leaders and people of ASEAN that will accelerate the economic, social and cultural development and integration of ASEAN as a community than one to host a World Cup final. It stands to reason to argue that governments, citizens, business and our dialogue partners will all surely benefit from such a decision.

The challenges of coordination and logistics in 11 countries will be enormous but ASEAN is already well connected by all forms of transportation and will surely be physically better integrated by 2030. The blueprints are already there or are all being drawn up.

The World Cup finals, like the Olympic Games, have a developmental imperative. Just imagine, 2030 is only fifteen years after the establishment of the ASEAN Community in 2015 when we will operate as One Community and as a single market.  ASEAN member states are working on a Schengen-like visa which will facilitate non-ASEAN citizens’ travel in the region.  The ASEAN Connectivity Master plan, recently launched, will connect ASEAN member states through air, land and sea transportation.

We can put forward a strong case to FIFA that we can function like a single nation as the host. Given the recent trend of FIFA in awarding the winning bids to new regions, ASEAN stands a strong chance.

According to FIFA rules, the host nation (or nations as in Korea and Japan which co-hosted in 2002) is automatically qualified to participate in the World Cup Finals. For sure, ASEAN cannot have all 11 countries compete in a tournament of 32 teams. But we could send representatives.  The winner of the ASEAN Cup in 2029 should get an automatic eligibility to contest in the ASEAN 2030 World Cup. Losers from the regional cup should still have a second shot at the World Cup by competing in the Asian Football Confederation’s qualifying rounds.

But if I could change FIFA’s mind I would encourage ASEAN, as host, to send a team with the best players from all 11 countries!

An ASEAN bid for 2030 could face stiff competition from China and Argentina-Uruguay. China has already expressed interest touting its experience in hosting the 2008 Summer Olympics and this year’s Asian Games.  China’s experience with world class sporting events and the fact that it has not hosted the game before makes it a tough competitor. But politically speaking, the unpredictable consequences of China’s rise to the world stage may affect its bid which could be viewed as only compounding China’s hegemonic status in Asia.

ASEAN, on the other hand, has been and will be the fulcrum for East Asia’s regional stability for a long time to come. A stronger and well recognized, well respected and well integrated ASEAN will be good for East Asia. These qualities of ASEAN should help us attract supporters from other Asian countries as well as other international stakeholders who look at the World Cup as more than merely a sporting event, but a significant show of “soft power.”

Uruguay and Argentina have already started their campaign and are planning to submit a joint bid. Their case rests on the fact that 2030 is the year that will commemorate the 100th anniversary of the tournament. Uruguay, having hosted the first competition in 1930, claims it should come back to the country in 2030. Argentina apparently just jumped on the bandwagon believing that it could benefit from Uruguay’s advantage. The representatives from the two countries have met with Sepp Blatter, FIFA’s Secretary-General.

This is again a credible challenge for ASEAN. But there is some comfort because if those two South American nations get to host in 2030, 2034 may be easier for us (assuming China doesn’t bid again).

Hosting the World Cup would further elevate ASEAN as a truly global power in all areas and would particularly reinforce its “soft power”.  It would be the first time a regional intergovernmental bloc holds a sporting event of such global scale. The EU has never done it. We will be perceived politically as a single entity. Revenues from broadcasting concessions, ticket sales, and advertising can be used towards further development. We could technically choose to build new stadiums in lesser developed cities in each of our countries to stimulate economic growth in those areas. Moreover, the two most-watched games – the opening and final- and high-profile games in the Group of Death could be held in needier members of ASEAN, namely Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar or Timor Leste, as means to stimulate economic development in those countries and show case them as new investment or travel destinations.

This is not the first time that this idea of hosting the world’s most important football tournament has been raised. At the 7th ASEAN Finance Ministers Investor Seminar concluded several days ago in Kuala Lumpur, Thailand’s Minister of Finance, Korn Chatikavanij – having just learned the news of Russia and Qatar winning the bids – apparently mooted his wish to see ASEAN hosting the World Cup to the distinguished audience. ASEAN Secretary-General Surin Pitsuwan, when told of the idea responded “Yes, I have been thinking about the same thing. I will push it. See if ASEAN will take the plunge.”

According to current FIFA’s host selection format, it will start soliciting for bids to host the 2030 World Cup in January 2017. The decision will be made in December 2018.

2015 is when the ASEAN Community – One Vision, One Identity, One Community – is to be realized. So what are we waiting for?