DoyleG
Reality sucks, Princesses!
The latest "bombshell" if its to be believed from Blatter is that the 2018/2022 World Cup hosts were practically decided in 2010 before the bidding process. It was agreed that 2018 would go to Russia so Eastern Europe would host its first World Cup and 2022 would go to the USA. Everybody agreed upon this until Sarkozy/Platini met with the royal family of Qatar and Platini put his support behind Qatar. Blatter claims the European members of the FIFA ExCo changed their support from the US to Qatar after this
I'm sure the other bidding nations are thrilled to hear this news after spending millions of dollars for their bids
Looking at the voting for 2022, Qatar was 1 or 2 votes short of getting a majority. No other bid really emerged as an alternative as it was between the US and South Korea. When the latter was dropped after the 3rd ballot, most of their votes went to Qatar.
As for 2018, Russia picked up the votes from the bottom bids that ended up putting them over the top.