Southeast Asian countries are jointly bidding to host the 2034 World Cup, Thai Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha said on Sunday after meetings of the region’s leaders in Bangkok.
Asia has only hosted the quadrennial showcase of international soccer once, when Japan and South Korea were joint hosts in 2002, and Qatar will return it to the continent in 2022.
“Leaders support the region, if possible, in hosting the FIFA World Cup in 2034.” Prayuth said at a press conference ending this yr’s first summit of the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).
“I would like to invite the people of ASEAN to support the football associations in their countries to make this dream a reality,” he said.
The ASEAN countries are Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam and Brunei.
The region is home to greater than 640 million people, a lot of whom follow soccer avidly, even when their national teams are relatively small fry and none of them have ever qualified for the World Cup finals.
The idea of ASEAN hosting the World Cup was first mooted earlier in the last decade, with supporters saying the move could help raise the region’s visibility and integration.
Hosting the World Cup would raise ASEAN’s global profile, and it could be the primary time the regional intergovernmental bloc would host a sporting event of such importance,” Fuadi Pitsuwan, a public policy researcher at Chiang Mai University and a long-time supporter of the initiative, told Reuters.
The 2002 edition is the one World Cup to be hosted by multiple country, however the United States, Canada and Mexico will jointly host the tournament in 2026.
Myanmar and Thailand have expressed interest in co-hosting the 2021 Under-20 World Cup, soccer’s world governing body FIFA said last month, and Indonesia is among the many countries considering a person bid for the tournament.
Source : Reuters | post office in Bangkok | French Media Agency
