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North American world cup bid shuffles leaders and tactics

The committee bidding to bring soccer’s 2026 World Cup to the United States, Mexico and Canada shuffled its leadership on Tuesday, announcing in a letter to FIFA’s 211 member associations that the bid’s chairman, Sunil Gulati, would relinquish that role to the federation presidents of the three countries in a change that they hope will stress the joint nature of the bid.

But he will be replaced as the public face of the bid by three co-presidents — Carlos Cordeiro of the United States, Decio De María of Mexico and Steven Reed of Canada — in the new structure.

The move appears to be both political and tactical. Gulati’s presence as chairman, and his success in claiming 75 percent of the potential 2026 World Cup matches for stadiums in the United States, had given the bid a distinctly American flavor.

But three years after a U.S. Justice Department investigation revealed widespread corruption at the highest levels of FIFA, leading to the ouster of most of its senior leadership, and as President Donald Trump has stoked fear about immigrants and insulted entire countries, the prospect that the vote could descend into a referendum on the United States or its government’s policies was not an insignificant bit of political calculus.

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Gulati praised the move, calling it “appropriate” as the countries shifted to campaign mode.

The letter, posted on the United Bid 2026 website and then released by Cordeiro on Twitter, nods at politics as it strikes a hopeful message of diversity and inclusion.

“We are determined to show that in challenging times when forces around the globe too often pull people apart, football can remind us of the common values and ideals — humanity, friendship and mutual respect — that unite us as fellow human beings,” it reads.

But the change in leadership also has a strategic component. For the first time, each of FIFA’s member federations has a vote on the World Cup host. So the decision to promote Cordeiro, De María and Reed to co-chairmen means each can spend the next three months soliciting the support of other countries — federation president to federation president — as a leader of a now actively North American bid.

It also means the North American bid can cover three times as much territory, more, even, than the famously mobile Gulati ever could. (As part of reforms instituted after previous World Cup voting scandals, bid committee members will have to inform FIFA of every contact with potential voters during the process.)

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There are risks to the strategy. Cordeiro, though well-known in FIFA circles because of his former role as a U.S. Soccer vice president under Gulati, has been in his post for less than a year, as has Canada's Reed, so there is a chance they remain unfamiliar to some voters in the notoriously clubby world of FIFA politics.

The 2026 World Cup will be the first with a field of 48 teams instead of the current 32, a significant expansion that will test any bidder. Cordeiro, Gulati and their Mexican and Canadian counterparts have long argued that an abundance of stadiums, training sites, hotels and transportation networks in North America make their bid an obvious choice.

Morocco’s bid has revealed few specifics about its plans for hosting, a daunting challenge that could require billions of dollars of investment in stadium projects. Morocco has said it wants to use 14 stadiums for the tournament; at the moment, the country has only six that are even theoretically up to the task, and several of those would need improvements to meet minimum standards set by FIFA for the World Cup.

The North American bid has 31 such stadiums available from the NFL alone, not to mention dozens of others at American colleges and in cities in Mexico and Canada. In October, the North American bid cut its list of possible sites in the three countries to 32.

The North American and Morocco bids are due by March 16. FIFA will conduct technical evaluations of each bid, and then present those findings to FIFA members.

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The vote on the 2026 hosting rights will take place at a FIFA congress in Moscow on June 13, one day before the opening game of this summer’s World Cup in Russia.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

ANDREW DAS © 2018 The New York Times

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