David Downs has been to five World Cups since 1990, but his favorite is still the 1994 World Cup in the U.S. The event defined his career, offering the 34-year-old ABC executive the chance to deliver commercial-free World Cup games for the first time in U.S. broadcast history.
Fifteen years later, Downs is embarking on what could be another career-defining moment tied to the World Cup. He recently left his job as Univision’s sports president to lead an effort to bring the World Cup back to U.S. soil in 2018 or 2022.
The task ahead is no easy one. Downs will have to put forward a bid that tops proposals from 10 countries, including joint bids from Spain and Portugal, and Belgium and the Netherlands, and independent bids from Australia, England, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Qatar and Russia.
FIFA is expected to announce the winning bidders for both the 2018 and 2022 World Cups by December 2010.
The U.S. Soccer Federation has been weighing a bid for the World Cup since last year but didn’t announce its intention until last week. The effort will be underwritten by the USSF, which had $72 million in assets on its balance sheet for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2007, tax filings show.
Downs, who will lead the effort as the bid’s executive director, is focused most immediately on securing office space and building out a small staff. He currently is working out of Major League Soccer’s offices but is considering alternative office space in Manhattan.
He plans to hire a “skeleton staff” of five to 10 employees. Once his staff is in place, Downs plans to start reaching out to cities and stadium authorities about hosting games. He hopes to pull together a list of some 20 stadiums that are willing to host World Cup games. That list would be narrowed to 12 if the U.S. were to be awarded the World Cup.
Downs said that the bid committee will be looking at cities with state-of-the-art, high-capacity facilities. Downs will be supported in the effort by a board that includes U.S. Soccer CEO Dan Flynn, MLS Commissioner Don Garber and Phil Murphy, a former Goldman Sachs senior director who was finance chair of the Democratic National Committee.
