Oceania will support Australia for 2022 World Cup

WELLINGTON - The Oceania Football Confederation is already committed to voting for Australia to host the 2022 World Cup, New Zealand Football chairman Frank van Hattum said Monday.

It has not yet, however, decided who to support for the 2018 event, in which England is competing with Russia and joint-bids from Spain-Portugal and Belgium-Netherlands, Van Hattum told Radio New Zealand.

Britain’s Sunday Times has reported that Reynald Temarii, 43, a Tahitian and president of the Oceania Football Confederation, asked for funding for a sports academy at a meeting in Auckland with an undercover reporter posing as a lobbyist for an American consortium seeking his vote for the US to host the cup.

The US has withdrawn its bid for the 2018 tournament to focus on 2022, where it is competing with Australia, Qatar, Japan and South Korea.

Temarii is on the 24-member Fifa committee which will vote on hosts for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups in a secret ballot in Zurich, Dec 2.

Van Hattum was quoted in Monday’s New Zealand Herald as saying he understood there had been “some attempt to stitch up a deal”, but New Zealand Football was not involved.

Fred de Jong, who is the Oceania Federation’s New Zealand representative, told the Herald he was very surprised by the Sunday Times allegations, which were a “bad look” for global football and

threatened “to bring the game down.”

“I don’t know the whole context so it’s difficult to pass judgment,” he said. “But I know Mr Temarii, and he’s a great guy.”

The Sunday Times also reported Amos Adamu, the Nigerian president of the West African Football Union who sits on FIFA’s executive committee, as saying he offered his vote in exchange for 800,000 US dollars to build four pitches in Nigeria - but asked for the money to be paid directly to him in meetings in London and Cairo.