Africa is apparently cornering the market on global tournaments at all levels.
We all know about South Africa 2010 (I suppose whether or not it actually comes to fruition remains to be seen). But Egypt and Nigeria were recently chosen as sites for youth tournaments.
Egypt will host the U-20 World Cup in 2009 and Nigeria the U-17 World Cup that year as well.
On a quick aside, FIFA dropped the name "World Championship" and switched to "World Cup" for its youth tournaments. The World Youth Championship is now the U-20 World Cup, which is good. World Cup grabs people's attention more than World Championship. Plus, nobody calls it World Cups but a lot of people referred to it as World Championships.
Anyway, it's good that the youth tourneys will be there. Not sure if the actual World Cup itself will end up being held there. These smaller tournaments are good for nations like Egypt and Nigeria and Canada (site of this year's U-20 tourney) because some countries just can't host it. Nigeria for instance doesn't have the capacity to host the actual World Cup but is a strong footballing nation and should be allowed to host something. Plus they already hosted a U-20 tournament before, the 1999 one.
1 comment:
Actually Nigeria has the capacity to host a world cup, which is why they bid for the 2010 wc. Nigeria has a fair amount of stadia ranging from 20k to 40/50k seaters, the problem is a few are now being rundown and the political situation in the country was never going to help Nigeria's bid. South Africa was always going to get the 2010 wc so Nigeria put its support behind South Africa.
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