For those of who you don't check the site regularly, I highly recommend checking out World Football Insider's coverage of the bidding process for the 2018 and 2022 World Cup finals. Their latest offering is an interesting analysis/handicapping of the various countries bidding to host soccer's biggest prize.
It's not surprising that they have England leading the field. Many writers, commentators and FIFA insiders have said that 2018 was the UK's race to lose, with its influence in FIFA, its impressive collection of tournament-ready stadia, and the fact that soccer's birth nation has not hosted the cup since 1966, which also saw the country raise its World Cup trophy. With a European World Cup looking more and more likely in 2018, England looks to be the best bet, although there have been some problems with bid cohesiveness over the past several months. If England experiences a tragic fall, Russia and the joint bids of Holland-Belgium and Spain-Portugal would gladly step in to fill the void.
What really interests me, and where I expect the battle to really intensify, is over the rights to hose the 2022 World Cup. A European victory in 2018 essentially makes the next cup a three-horse race between Australia, the United States and Qatar. Indonesia's bid is on life-support, and Japan and South Korea have been fairly recent hosts.
WFI and other authoritative news sites don't seem ready to make predictions on which of these three would come out of this race. Ask the Australian press, and they say its down-under vs. the new world. Ask the Americans, and they tell you its the Qataris they are worried about. It should be an exciting ten months to say the least.
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