FIFA Executive Committee Member Chuck Blazer Hits Out Against Possible January World Cup

"If you look at the timing of some of these announcements; pronouncements immediately after the vote from (Franz) Beckenbauer and (Michel) Platini and everyone else one after another, I am sure that these were ideas that had been discussed before," Blazer said on Monday.

"The issue of the heat trouble were never addressed by the candidate ... there was a certain incongruity to me that there are people who are really dedicated to their teams and to the sport who were not having any difficulty with the idea of playing in that level of heat on an ongoing basis throughout the tournament," said Blazer, who stated in December that he voted for the United States to host and had some unanswered questions about the Qatari bid.

"They very quickly, after the fact, made these statements saying 'oh yeah let's just switch.' I have some level of difficulty with that."

Most of all, Blazer questioned whether it was logistically possible to play the tournament in January. Some who support the calendar change have said that many league's take the Christmas and New Year's holidays off anyways and some don't come back to play until late January or February so it wouldn't be much of an issue. Blazer countered that by saying that it isn't just a matter of taking four weeks off to play the tournament, but also the preparation time teams need before the tournament.

"This isn't a matter of taking four weeks out of the winter and saying here is the World Cup. It is more a matter, at that point, of taking 10 weeks out of the winter and saying here, we are carving out an entire new summer in order to have proper preparation for the teams." Blazer said.

"The ultimate damage that we would be doing isn't something that should be done without due consideration."

The World Cup has always been held in the northern hemisphere's summer, typically in June and July. Blazer made clear that he isn't asking for the hosting duties to be put up for grabs once more with another vote and the January calendar known to all voters. Instead, he believes that all parties should be consulted and all issues evaluated before the possibility of making the calendar change is pushed forward.

"If the thought is to move it to winter, we should do a careful analysis involving all the stakeholders, clubs, leagues, coaches, players, everyone and sit down and figure out what is the best thing to do because moving it to winter has serious ramifications," said Blazer.

Going forward, Blazer believes that FIFA need to reconsider how they select World Cup hosts. He spoke about the bid evaluations that FIFA has always carried out, but that he believes don't carry enough weight. Specifically, he mentioned that the summer heat in Qatar was mentioned in the bid's evaluation report, but prior to the vote, that concern was never addressed and is instead being addressed now.

"I think the process where we send people out to each of the venues, to do a comprehensive report and they come back and present that report and nobody asks any questions about it and nobody spends any time dealing with the issues of the report, certainly sells the reports short, or even ourselves short," he said, adding that reform of the process should be on the agenda.

"Somehow we have to be certain that we take matters like that seriously into consideration, I'm not sure how we go about doing that - maybe the inspection gets a certain amount of weight, maybe votes get another weight. I don't know, but we have got eight years to figure that out ... before we vote on 2026," he said.