England 2018 adviser Sir Keith Mills believes that England are playing ‘catch up’ on their rivals in their bid to host the 2018 World Cup.
FIFA will vote on the 2018 hosts in Zurich on 2nd December, with Russia currently the bookmakers’ favourites and Spain/Portugal and Holland/Belgium also in contention.
There are concerns that English media investigations of FIFA could see the country miss out, with a BBC Panorama programe to be screened next week unlikely to help their chances
And Mills, one of the campaign’s senior advisers, told the Evening Standard that victory will be “difficult, we are behind, we need to catch up. We are still in with a shout”.
However, Mills added: “We’ve had to deal with a huge amount of unfavourable British media attention around FIFA, and FIFA members are clearly not happy about that.
“There is a general feeling that the British media are out to get FIFA and the job we’ve had in the past few weeks has been to explain to them that’s not the case.
“I would be surprised if there were any major new revelations. It will be an irritant to FIFA but I don’t think it’ll be a fatal blow.”
