The decision by FIFA bigwigs is solely about where the power is in the new world order, and it’s not in quiet, dusty old England. No-one should be trying to make Panorama a scapegoat, either – this is a decision that would have been reached regardless of their investigations.

We live in an age of infocapitalists. Those with the biggest budgets are always most likely to buy up these big events – and who is bigger these days than the big, oil rich states?

The big sporting events are essentially being divvied up in a huge game of Risk amongst the new powers – and if England thinks it belongs in that pecking order, it needs to step back and think again. No matter how many prime ministers, Royals or sporting legends we throw at a bid in the future, we are not likely to ever be top of the selection pecking order (although David Beckham’s turn as a diplomat was surprisingly convincing). Never mind that no-one will find it easy to play football in the heat of Qatar; football follows the money.

Anyone who complains about the decision is missing the point – England just doesn’t have the muscle to compete creatively for a World Cup bid at this level, despite the fact that we have the infrastructure ready made to host it.

We may have invented the sport, but football has grown beyond us and the people in charge don’t anyway give a damn about the sport. These are the sorts of people who will buy a premiership club because it looks good in their portfolio, not because they care about the fans or the beautiful game.

When it comes to the big leagues and the world competitions, a relatively poor country like England just doesn’t stand a chance.

It really is fabulous news, in such tough economic times, that the cuts will not affect everything. In 2011 there will be something for the whole nation to celebrate, especially the merchandise sellers, caterers and makers of bunting. It’s really an early Christmas present for them all.

And better still, it’ll take place 30 years after Charles and Diana’s wedding. We will have a new Princess of Hearts – and the same sort of economic straits then as now. Perhaps we’ll get anniversary riots in Brixton and Toxteth too, only to have the wedding calm them down.

And if this exceptional and fabulous stunt doesn’t calm the angrily beating heart of Britain, then there will be a second pageant the following year when the Olympics comes to town. All this should make up for the fact that we probably won’t get the World Cup, shouldn’t it?

And if this pump priming of the economy still doesn’t work, we could always celebrate another anniversary in the Falklands in 2013, couldn’t we? There’s nothing quite like a war for stimulating economic revival, after all!

–

Cynicism aside, it’ll be interesting to see how the royal couple cope. It is to be hoped that the couple – and the a Royal PR – have learned lessons from Princess Diana’s trials and tribulations, but the media has changed beyond recognition in the past thirty years. How will Kate Middleton learn to cope with the pressure?

As I noted yesterday, the Palace used to shut its doors at 5pm daily. Now it is proactive and on call to respond to anything, anytime. The couple need to be well prepared for the onslaught of interest a Royal wedding inevitably brings, what with the digital explosion and easy, instantaneous access to information. I expect they will be being drilled in the ways of dealing with the media over the coming months.

They’ve got to be perfect if they’re going to act as a fillip for the economy, after all.

–

This is a one fact story – “they’re getting married” sums it up – and yet, as the day goes on, it is elongating out of all control. It’s all over the news channels and I can’t help but suspect that all sorts of brands and celebrities will be getting in on the act, hoping a little of the stardust will rub off on them. After all, David Cameron is already proudly announcing that he slept on the Mall aged 15 for the 1981 wedding…

I might be wrong, but it all feels so fake. Certainly, David Beckham looks set to sue the US magazine for the claims that he went a bit Rooney.

Bauer – who publish In Touch – clearly did not comprehend the chaos that would be unleashed. I suspect their office must have echoed with the cry of: “Bugger the truth, the story is too good to ignore!” The fall out and collective web chatter suggests a plethora of conspiracy theories. My favourite so far is the one that suggests that it is a hoax attempting to derail England’s World Cup bid.

A close second is the theory that it’s a desperate publicity play by the fragrant model, a ridiculous attempt to generate traction at a time when she has designs on becoming governor of NYC. Can the US stomach their very own La Cicciolina, the porn star who was elected to the Italian parliament? Stranger things have started in the bedrooms of international football stars. If so, the deluded über-babe has gone to a lot of effort to force herself onto the celebrity radar.

I expected the wonderfully funny fake Max Clifford twitter account to go into overdrive, anticipating a flurry of tweets suggesting that he leaked the tale to cover up a breaking exposé concerning Simon Cowell’s affair with Goldenballs.

In a world of total lunacy please take time to read the mischievously wicked tweets from @Straightsimon and @Max_Clifford. God bless the respective camps for allowing these comic tweeters to hilariously cyber squat; they prove beyond doubt the publicist Jim Moran’s dictum: “There’s nothing so dismal as a fact!”

The article is desperate to get people fulminating about spoilt football players in the wake of England’s World Cup flop, on the assumption that these football “legends” are heroes and idols for the nation’s kids who are betraying their legions of fans by going out and being normal. They are doing nothing of the sort.

British football has moved far too far away from the streets to be able to be seen as the people’s sport any more, and almost nothing of the millions being poured into people like Rooney’s pockets is coming back to the street to allow a new generation of great footballers to develop.

The media, however, still need to build these ordinary, fallible, serially overpaid people into heroes. However, whereas in the past they were built up to be perpetuated as idols (just look at the 1966 World Cup team, who shall forever be used as rods to beat the backs of any English footballers with even an ounce of talent), they are now being built up to be destroyed at the first sign of feet of clay.

The media need these modern footballers to behave badly, as the stories that sell papers are the soap operas, the tales of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. These are the stories that resonate most completely with the 21st century British public; they have been created only to be destroyed for the vicarious thrill of the tabloid- and website-reading masses.

The only extraordinary thing about Rooney is the amount of money he earns for being pretty good at striking a ball towards a net – in the usual run of things, this is a man who would be down the pub most weekends, having a laugh with his mates, not buying mansions. So next time you read an article full of outrage and disappointment, please remember that the media – be it tabloid- or web-based – thrives on badly behaved sports and TV stars and will do all that they can to manufacture the conditions in which said star can fail in style so they can keep on selling you papers.

What do we really expect, though, when the players have too much time, money and self-regard on their hands? Take Ashley Cole, for example: he’s being lambasted in today’s Sun for sending a message on his Blackberry stating that he hates “…England and the fucking people”. It’s not really surprising that a fuss is being made – this was sent before a game had been played.

The FA are taking flack too, which may explain the rumour that Wayne Rooney will be taking part in a fan forum discussion online to diffuse the ugly situation. I can’t imagine it will, especially since Rooney apparently booked himself a holiday in Barbados two days before the dismal match against Germany.

From a PR standpoint, I’d say the best bet would be to have a cooling off period before throwing Rooney to the ravening community of football fans. It seems too desperate and too soon to me.

A cooling off period is advisable – much like the one Capello has been given. Time heals all wounds, they say. Certainly, in this instance, time would allow the England team a chance to become suitably contrite. It should also stop the press and the fans from tearing them to pieces.

Just so long as none of them open their mouths in public for a fortnight, all should be well…

It seems likely that he will go, and soon, despite a few bullish headlines suggesting that we should blame the players rather than the manager. Capello’s struggles with English and his authoritarian regime will not stand him in good stead. And he is not an accessible man, which is utterly essential in a job like this.

Look at Simon Cowell, a man who is subjected to equally rigorous scrutiny. Despite employing the services of Max Clifford and having a bank balance that could be easily used to buy off damaging stories, he remains entirely accessible. That this accessibility is carefully structured is certain, but it is more than just an impression and it certainly appeases the media.

Whoever takes over from Capello will have to be aware of this and be able to manage the media as surely and subtly as he manages the players. Whoever it is will really need to be an Englishman, or at least someone who speaks English as their first language – it is essential, from a footballing and a PR point of view, that the new manager is a clear communicator.

The manager of England’s football team, like the CEO of a big company (who can see the correlation between Tony Hayward and Capello, both inexpert at getting a useful point across?), needs to be savvy and manage expectations, be they supporters’, players’ or the media’s.

I suggest Harry Redknapp, a manager who understands both front and back pages, has no truck with ivory towers and who would most likely instil a sense of discipline in a new set of players.

I think Redknapp could take the England football squad into a brave new world of carefully downscaled expectation. Ironically, this could lead to England doing rather better in future.

I’ve been drowning my ennui
in tequila, beer and noise,
trying to float the bubble
football blows and then destroys

I’ve been drowning my ennui.
I’ve been blotting the despair
that’s been welling up inside me
since England were laid bare.

I’ve been drowning my ennui
in lager laced with lime
and it tastes a little salty
but the drowning feels sublime.

PLAY THE GAME, LADS, AND LET’S TALK.

So then, after our completely predictable exit from Euro 2004 during the summer, England’s footballers are now trying to qualify for the World Cup in 2006, and what hard work they’re making of it. They didn’t play too badly against Poland and won the match 2 – 1, but then decided, in an act of childish petulance, that they weren’t going to talk to the spiky media because someone had written some shittythings about them since their epic draw last week against the steely might and legendary footballing skills of…Austria.

Come on lads… do we need another own goal? No we don’t, so please don’t create PR disasters off the pitch: your performance on it is too often quite sufficient to get the flak. Aren’t your fame and your money sufficient? Isn’t it enough that you’ll earn in a year more than most of your fans will earn in two lifetimes? No, you don’t understand, but perhaps we don’t understand you either.

Inside football there’s always been an attitude that if you’ve never actually played the game at the top level, you’ll never really grasp it, or the way players think about it. To be trusted you need to have been bloodied by the relentless pressure of the professional game, and that’s where Sven Goran Ericsson scores so highly with his England squad. While sports correspondents and fans may see the players as bit part actors in an on-going soap opera, the Head Coach has to concentrate on balancing them as competitive footballers, trying to make the best of their individual traits and ball-skills as he merges them all into a winning team.

High-minded stuff, all concentrating on what happens on the pitch and at the training ground. The trouble is that nowadays so much of the life of a footballer is lived elsewhere. In restaurants, in bars, in public and in front of the TV cameras, and how few footballers are able to cope. But Sven, need we be reminded, has been coping with his own media-management challenge. When the England manager’s sex life becomes the story, as it did over the summer, you know there’s a problem.

In the USA they understand this. Their hugely-paid black, urban basketball stars have professional media coaching like politicians or pundits, so instead of being either cliché-spouting ‘over the moon’ parrots or completely gauche and tongue-tied youths, any comment they might be asked to make in public, win or lose, appears thoughtful, sincere, and contributes to the overall PR of their team. They’re taught to respect the media’s role in the whole picture, to keep good-humoured, win or lose, and let their position as flawed gods work in their favour by the simple use of charm.

So the England team need a bit of help managing their media profile. The days of football journalists researching stories about football and having them appear on the football pages are fast disappearing. The Game is front page news now, yet beyond Beckham, Owen and a handful of others, the cast don’t think of themselves as responsible role models, hence the thoughtlessness of their press boycott on Wednesday night.

And you can hardly blame them when, behind their club gates, they’re shielded and cosseted and rewarded beyond their wildest dreams. Just occasionally you might be bollocked by the Assistant Coach for staying out too late, or by the Head Coach for getting into the tabloids for some non-footballing reason, but it’s hardly parenting. It’s not what your father would say if you started behaving like a prima donna around the house and refused to speak to your granny.

I realise it’s not exactly relaxing being an international footballer, but perhaps they need reminding of the mechanic by which they’ve been elevated to such eminence in this celebrity-struck society of ours. It’s because fans pay money at club and league level, and pay it through the nose. Their fans pay their salaries, week after week, funding the exotic lifestyles of this squad of young men who took it upon themselves to deny those same fans access to their feelings immediately following a most welcome England victory. We urgently need to talk.

One sacking, several arrests (ambush marketing being illegal in South Africa) and a barrel-full of free publicity for Bavaria later and the only clear winner is the beer company, although the attractive young ladies – already described as ‘blonde bombshells’ in tabloids and blogs – will probably enjoy their day in court.

Anyone wanting to manage a crisis should never have let this get to court, of course. The great American publicist Jim Moran, who I wrote about in The Fame Formula, always wanted to get his stunts to court so as to achieve maximum notoriety and ability to push out sound bites on behalf of his clients. This is the man who said “It’s a sad day for American democracy if a man can’t fly a midget on a kite over Central Park” after the police stopped him from executing that stunt in the 1940s.

The biggest loser in all this is, of course, Robbie Earle, who has hired Phil Hall to help massage any potential long-term career damage and who should take more care about where his largesse is actually going in future. I doubt he actually knew that the tickets he passed on were going to a guerilla marketing company but regardless.

But I can’t imagine that the sponsors will be too happy that FIFA, instead of starving the incident of oxygen actually fanned the flames of publicity by letting it get to court. A big company’s sponsorship is dependent on exclusivity – but enforcing the law rigorously with a group of attractive women is always going to attract further, and unwanted, interest.

TV learned the lesson with streakers – ignore them and the tendency to seek publicity by stripping withers and dies. Had FIFA done this, and had ITV waited a while before ousting Earle, we would likely not have heard of Bavaria beer except as a passing reference, an arcane trivia quiz question in years to come. But thanks to the manhandling of the situation, the midgets are flying over New York for all to see. Jim Moran would have been delighted.

Still, at least Green is English, where all he faces is ridicule and crushing, sweaty disappointment. In 1994, Columbian footballer Andrés Escobar was murdered after scoring an own goal in the World Cup. If England fail to progress, Green is likely to be vilified by the myopic soccer tribe in full rhetorical flow and be verbally lumped in with paedophiles, murderers and rapists in bitter conversations down the pub.

This despite the fact that, post-match, Green fronted up his error and bravely faced the media, admitting to the gaffe whilst attempting to take control of the narrative. In PR terms, it was a flawless effort in damage limitation. But, reading the papers today, the media continue to sadistically throw salt onto his open wound. We need a scapegoat and Green is the man of the hour.

Is this continued hysteria evidence of our collective derangement? And if so, what will come of it? The media sustain an overbearing optimism that this wretched bunch of sporting icons can somehow fulfil the nation’s sporting dreams. It reaches such a pitch that one might be easily convinced that winning the World Cup glory would somehow cure cancer.

The repetitive conjuring of the spirit of 1966 is damaging overkill. The pressure fashioned by an unhinged media every four years (assuming that England even manage to qualify, of course) becomes a onerous burden that suffocates any prospect of glory. How can intense media scrutiny be a good thing? It is, without doubt, the single biggest destroyer of any promise of success. The American approach – a few lines on the front page and a bigger report in the sports section – seems a lot healthier.

Alleviating the phenomenon of hype might just might give the team a chance to forget themselves on the pitch and put in a World Cup campaign performance that will surprise and delight. Footballing glory used to be as much about unplanned serendipity as anything else. Can anyone remember that time? It seems an ever more distant memory nowadays and would most likely appear miraculous if it happened in the current media climate.