Morocco won right to host 2010 Cup: report

An explosive report in a British newspaper claims Morocco won the vote to host the 2010 World Cup but the ballot was rigged to award the tournament to South Africa, reports Fox Sports‎.

In one of the most significant revelations since senior Fifa executives were arrested late last month, the Sunday Times has published tapes in which a senior official says he and his colleagues believed Morocco won the right to host football’s global showpiece after asking each other who they voted for.

The former executive committee member, Ismail Bhamjee from Morocco, acknowledges that people could have lied about who they voted for but claims the ballot papers were deliberately miscounted.

“After talking with everybody ... Whose votes went where? We’re all colleagues, you know. And then we found out that actually Morocco won by two votes,” The Sunday Times reported Bhamjee as saying.

Bhamjee himself is no stranger to controversy, having been banned from Fifa after admitting to selling tickets to the 2006 World Cup in Germany for three times their face value.

And in a 2011 report that was also released by The Sunday Times, Bhamjee was quoted as saying Qatar’s bid for the 2022 World Cup was successful after paying African Fifa committee members in exchange for votes.

While that and many other subsequent reports have hinted at bribes being common place during the World Cup bidding process, this weekend’s claims in the Sunday Times are extraordinary in that they suggest the vote itself was tampered with.

Fifa is already reeling from the fallout of the arrests coordinated by the FBI last month, which culminated in president Sepp Blatter announcing he will step down from his post within 12 months.

The 2010 World Cup has been the focus of much of the evidence released by the FBI since the arrests.

One letter appeared to show Blatter’s No.2, Fifa secretary-general Jerome Valcke, being requested to assist in the transferral of $10 million from the South African bid team to disgraced Caribbean football boss Jack Warner.