IT LOOKS TO ME  like Rick Parry has landed the job of heading up England’s 2018 World Cup bid.

 

The Liverpool chief executive emerged as the surprise runner in the field last week ahead of final interviews.

 

Though best known for running one of world football’s most illustrious brands, Parry, 53, has exposure to the Olympic bid process, having played a part in Manchester’s bid for the 1996 Games.

 

He was also once chief executive of an urban regeneration project known as the Manchester Phoenix Initiative.

 

End criticism

 

If he has got the nod to be England 2018 chief executive, it should put paid to domestic criticism of the structure of the bid’s board for favouring politics over football.

 

Quite how the arrival at the head of the bid of a man who is also a former chief executive of the Premier league would go down with international football leaders, some of whom are less than enamoured of the Premiership’s business-minded approach to the beautiful game, is more open to question.

 

Though well-placed to win the right to stage the tournament for the first time since 1966, England is likely to face strong competition, with Russia, Australia and Qatar among possible bidders.

 

The choice of host is expected to be made by the Executive Committee of FIFA, world football’s governing body, in 2011.

 

● Moving to another World Cup - 2010 - I used a visit to London by top officials of South African Tourism (SAT) and the competition’s organising committee last week to get an update on how things are looking.

 

Theirs was an upbeat message, as you would expect, but what really interested me, as a keen student of England’s perennial "Club versus Country" tangles, was SAT chief executive Moeketsi Mosola’s take on the South African Premier Soccer League’s lucrative new television rights deal.

 

The gist of his argument was that staging the World Cup was proving of huge benefit to club football in South Africa because it was attracting substantial new investment into the game.

 

There has been “a fundamental shift in the commercial nature of the game in South Africa,” Mosola told me, arguing that the rights deal – which he said was worth Rand1.5 billion, up from about R500 million last time – “would not have happened if we were not in the middle of hosting the World Cup.

 

“No question about it, we would have had incremental increases,” he said.

 

"Football is cool"

 

Sponsorship is also buoyant, with companies unable to afford the World Cup seeking out domestic alternatives.

 

“To be associated with the game of football now has become a really cool thing,” Mosola - a Bloemfontein Celtic and Arsenal fan -says.

 

To complete the virtuous circle, the increased investment in domestic football is even benefiting the national team, as top players start to realise that they don’t necessarily have to head to Europe to make good money.

 

This will be music to the ears of Fifa, whose boss Sepp Blatter earlier this year expressed disappointment at results achieved by Bafana Bafana since South Africa was awarded the tournament.

 

In recent weeks, the team has enjoyed a rare three-match winning streak, although they are still ranked a lowly 80th in the world.

 

A really big test looms on Wednesday when they host the Indomitable Lions of Cameroon, the top-ranked African team, in Rustenburg.

 

Other points to emerge were that neither Mosola nor organising committee chief marketing officer Derek Carstens expect either electricity supply problems or next year’s general election to get in the way of a successful World Cup.

 

On power supplies, Mosola said that while there were “certain planning decisions that the country could have taken much earlier…we believe that both the Confederations Cup [about which more in a minute] and the World Cup will not actually experience a power crisis at all.”

 

On politics and the World Cup, he said there was “a consensus in our society: you do not mess with this thing”.

 

Corporate hospitality sales are going well, with Carstens disclosing that 44 South African companies had so far spent a total of $95 million. 

 

There were also two points I had not until now appreciated.

 

The first is what a very African World Cup this will be.

 

Whereas 450,000 extra visitors are expected from outside Africa, as many as 1.5 million-2 million may come from elsewhere on the continent.

 

It is clear too that if South Africa don’t win the competition (all but impossible without further massive improvement), local organisers will be rooting for one of the other African teams.

 

“We want an African team to win this thing,” Carstens says.

 

Big year for South Africa

 

The other point that had escaped me is what a big year for South African sport 2009 will be, with Australia’s cricketers and the British and Irish Lions rugby union side both due to visit, in addition to the Confederations Cup, which should bring the Italian, Spanish and Brazilian football teams to the country.

 

A big organisational test will come when Ellis Park in Johannesburg hosts the Confederations Cup final and the third Springboks v Lions Test on consecutive weekends in June and July.

 

“That stadium is going to have to be completely turned around from the point of view of the way it looks,” Carstens says.

 

“So we are putting ourselves to a double test.”

 

The sports world, in particular Fifa, will be watching closely.

 

David Owen is a specialist sports journalist who worked for 20 years for the Financial Times in the United States, Canada, France and the UK. He ended his FT career as sports editor after the 2006 World Cup and is now freelancing, including covering the recent Beijing Olympics