Australia bid for 2022 World Cup was "clean" insists outgoing FFA President ahead of documentary broadcast

Frank Lowy has claimed Australia's bid for the 2022 World Cup was clean ©Getty Images

Outgoing Football Federation Australia (FFA) President Frank Lowy insists Australia ran a “clean” bid to host the 2022 World Cup despite allegations of misuse of donations in their attempt to secure the rights to stage the tournament.

Lowy’s comments come ahead of today's broadcast of a new ABC documentary, entitled “Played: Inside Australia’s Failed World Cup bid”, which is expected to detail previously unknown allegations about how Qatar eventually won a vote laden with controversy and corruption.

It is alleged that the Bid Committee gave around $6 million (£3.9 million/€5.6 million) in donations to 12 countries it hoped to secure votes from in the race and paid a sum of $500,000 (£329,000/€4.7 million) for a football centre in Trinidad and Tobago which ultimately ended up in the pocket of disgraced CONCACAF President Jack Warner, who is now banned from football for life.

A total of roughly $43 million (£28.2 million/€40.3 million) was spent on Australia’s bid.

The documentary will claim that underhanded tactics were used by Qatar to win the bid, including accusations that the country signed geopolitical deals in exchange for votes.

It claims three FIFA Executive Committee members, President Sepp Blatter, Asian Confederation president Mohamed Bin Hammam and Oceania representative Reynald Temarii, all pledged their support before Australia launched its bid.

Bin Hammam, who is at the centre of the 2022 World Cup scandal, reportedly continued to promise Lowy, who will step down as FFA head today, that he would vote for Australia while he was secretly concocting a slush fund to help Qatar.

Lowy also insists two people rang him after the announcement was made to tell them they had voted for Australia despite the country claiming a miserly one vote.

Current FIFA President Sepp Blatter allegedly pledged his support to Australia's 2022 World Cup bid ©Getty Images

“The funnelling of money to people who were in a position to influence a vote was done on an industrial scale; tens of millions of dollars,” Mark Ryan, a trusted adviser to Lowy, said.

“We didn’t have natural gas contracts to threaten countries with, or the supply of aircraft or military hardware.

“These were the kind of deals that were being traded in exchange for World Cup bid votes and we were nowhere in that game.”

The 85-year-old, who will be replaced as the FFA President by son Steven, maintains Australia did nothing wrong in their attempt to bring the World Cup to the continent for the first time and has dismissed suggestions they tried to follow the likes of Qatar in bribing their way to victory in the bidding race.

“I was never going to be part of a dirty bid, not because I'm honest and not because I'm straight, but because I didn't want to tarnish the name of Australia and my own,” he said.

“FIFA's culture is what we now know that it is.

“At the time, we didn't know.

“We were outplayed because there was a lot more money available for those people to play the game.

“They had a lot more influence than we had.”

Following the arrest of 14 officials ahead of FIFA's Congress in Zurich in May, where Blatter was successfully re-elected before he stood down shortly after, investigations were launched into the 2018 and 2022 World Cup bid processes.