The president of UEFA, Aleksander Ceferin, affirmed this Monday that he is “certain” that Spain and Portugal will host the 2030 World Cup, two countries that “feel” football.
“I am certain that we are going to have the 2030 World Cup in Spain and Portugal”, assured Ceferin during his participation in the opening of Football Talks, conferences organized in Lisbon at the headquarters of the Portuguese Football Federation (FPF).
During a virtual intervention, he pointed out that he sees the proposal as “a winning tender” and acknowledged that they are going to work “to help”. “It is up to Europe to host the World Cup,” she insisted.
Spain and Portugal signed an agreement for the launch of the joint candidacy in June 2021, eleven years after having also presented a shared project to organize the 2018 World Cup that FIFA awarded to Russia, in a vote in which it also granted the World Cup in Qatar 2022.
In addition to Spain and Portugal, Uruguay, together with Argentina, Chile and Paraguay launched their project for the “Centennial World Cup” on August 2 at the Centenario Stadium in Montevideo, as a purported tribute to the 100th anniversary of the first World Cup event, organized by Uruguay in 1930.
Ceferin also referred to the future of women’s football to point out that it is a sport in expansion, “completely different from five years ago”, in which you can and should invest.
“We do not lose money in investing and it is worth investing. The products that are new are the ones we should invest in (…) because it is relatively cheap,” he said.
On the use of technology in sport, he defended the use of available resources, such as VAR, although “the referee on the field should have the last word.”
The technology has a “protective” function on the players in case of doubt but “should never replace the human factor.”
Questioned about the game times, he discarded the proposal to only count the useful time even in adverse weather situations and proposed that the referees penalize those who lose time.
“We have all the tools to prevent it from happening… Stopping the ball would mean that football is no longer football,” he said.
