Morocco offers World Cup safety but little certainty

“Morocco is one of the world’s safest countries,” the Morocco bid declares in the executive summary of its bid, which emphasizes broad concepts like passion and sustainability but conspicuously avoids direct mention of the elephant hiding in plain sight: a minimum price tag of $15.8 billion for roads, railways and at least nine new stadiums.

The specifics of the bid by Morocco’s soccer federation were posted Monday, when FIFA released its official bid book along with the one from a combined North American bid by the federations of the United States, Mexico and Canada.

The North Americans released most of the details of their proposal two weeks ago. That bid, called United 2026, includes projections for record ticket sales (5.8 million) and ticket revenue ($500 million) but also stresses what its leaders believe is one of the most appealing features it is offering to FIFA: 23 stadiums and more than 150 training sites that are already built.

That kind of certainty — a word that appears more than 50 times in the North American bid book — could appeal to FIFA, especially for the 2026 tournament, which will be the first with an expanded 48-team field. The North American bid book included several new details: it proposes holding the final at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, and charging $21 to $323 for group-stage tickets. (Morocco’s ticket prices in the early rounds are in the same range, though the sheer size of North America’s stadiums means its bid can sell many more tickets.)

Morocco’s bid, by contrast, is more speculative. It proposes a compact tournament held in 14 stadiums spread over 12 cities, all within a 550-kilometer (340-mile) radius of the country’s largest city, Casablanca. But nine of the stadiums would have to be built for the tournament, and each of the other five would require tens of millions of dollars in improvements to meet FIFA standards.

Estimates for the costs of the unbuilt stadiums vary: a new 93,000-seat stadium in Casablanca to host the opening match and the final comes with a projected construction cost of about $400 million, while 45,000-seat arenas in Oujda ($47.6 million) and Tetouan ($38.8 million) list improbably small figures for stadiums their size.

Six modular stadiums also are planned, each potentially costing about $150 million. The bid suggests two multibillion-dollar high-speed rail lines and nearly a dozen other road and railway projects — at a cost of additional billions — would be completed in time for the tournament.

The total figure of infrastructure spending that Morocco officials announced this month when they submitted their plan to FIFA — $15.8 billion — does not appear in the executive summary, though the document does note a projected profit for FIFA of $5 billion.

The Moroccan bid mimics many of the talking points that Qatar used in its successful bid for the 2022 tournament: unqualified support from the country’s monarchy as part of a broad national development plan; limited travel for teams, fans and the news media; and extensive use of modular stadium construction. That may not be coincidental: Qatari officials have publicly backed the Moroccan bid, and some of the consultants who masterminded Qatar’s success in the corruption-marred bidding for the 2022 tournament have signed on to push Morocco’s candidacy.

FIFA will begin technical evaluations of both bids in April, when a five-member committee will visit all four countries to assess the stadiums, practice sites and infrastructure they have proposed using for the event.

Each bid will receive a score from the committee, and those reports will be made public, but under the bidding regulations, the committee has the right to exclude any bid if it finds “a material failure” by a bidder to meet minimum requirements.

At a FIFA Council meeting in Colombia earlier this month, African officials, who back Morocco, sought to weaken the committee’s power to exclude bidders before a vote, but FIFA’s leadership — led by the organization’s president, Gianni Infantino — fought off efforts to change the rules. The argument took about an hour before Infantino asked members to vote on the issue, something that the committee rarely does.

A final vote on the 2026 host will be held June 13 in Moscow, one day before the opening match of this summer’s World Cup.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.