Sydney, Dec 10 (DPA) Plans to make Sydney’s Olympic stadium football-friendly would push along Australia’s troubled bid to host either the 2018 or 2022 World Cup, analysts said Thursday.
The bid has faltered over the refusal of rugby league and Australian Rules Football authorities to volunteer their sports grounds.

FIFA requires bidding nations to have 12 stadiums free, each with a minimum capacity of 40,000. Australia has the stadiums - but they will only be free if rugby league and AFL authorities play ball and release them.

The Daily Telegraph reported plans for a 150-million-Australian-dollar (138-US-million-dollar) renovation of Sydney’s Olympic stadium, now called ANZ Stadium, that would give it the southern hemisphere’s first retractable roof and a rectangular configuration suitable for football.

ANZ Stadium, as with almost all other Australian grounds, is oval to suit rugby league and Australian Rules Football, which is akin to rugby.

The changes would allow grandstands to move forward or retract according to the code being played.

The revamp would not only please FIFA, which would prefer a rectangle, but give Sydney an edge over Melbourne in the contest to host the World Cup final.

“It will knock Melbourne out,” the paper quoted a source close to the project as saying.

The Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG), the main venue for the 1956 Olympics and the 2006 Commonwealth Games, had been touted as the best location for the World Cup finals. But FIFA has reservations about the MCG staging the concluding match because, as an oval rather than a rectangle, seating starts 23 metres from the dead-ball line at either end as against 5 metres for a rectangular configuration.

Australia is hoping that Asia’s booming economies would sway FIFA into picking a host in the Asian region late next year when it shuffles through bids from England, Japan, Mexico, Indonesia, Qatar, Russia, the United States and joint offers from Belgium and Holland and Spain and Portugal.