That didn’t take long: it’s been scarcely a week since Rio emerged triumphant as host-city of the 2016 Olympics, yet already the sports world has moved on emphatically to the next big thing – the race for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups.
 

With a Leaders in Football conference scheduled for last week in London, this abrupt switch was perhaps on the cards.

A little less predictable (but, OK, only a little) was the cascade of criticism showered on England’s World Cup bid, with one English newspaper posing the question, "Will England’s 2018 team do a Chicago?"

This sort of comparison should not be overdone: we are talking about very, very different races. The World Cup 'electorate' – also known as FIFA's Executive Committee - numbers only 24 (versus more than 100 members of the International Olympic Committee). And fully a third of them are from countries who are bidding for one competition or the other.

Nonetheless, there is one important way in which England’s position in the world of football is similar to that of the United States in Olympicland.

This is that, whatever they do, the rest of the world seems more inclined to typecast them in the role of pantomime villain than any other country.

This is very hard to address. Bid leaders have striven mightily to guard against any trace of the arrogance for which English football has been pilloried in the past. But is this compatible with the salesmanship necessary to persuade the rest of the world that England’s bid is best? It will be a delicate balance to strike.

One advantage of England 2018 over Chicago 2016 is that England’s technical bid - crammed with big, modern, evocative, football-specific arenas – should be demonstrably the best on offer.

Another is that it has in the Premier League, a globally revered product that takes English football into the living-rooms of fans of every nation – including countries with FIFA Executive Committee members such as Thailand and Nigeria - on a weekly basis.
 
Unfortunately this is a two-edged sword: FIFA and UEFA, the European football confederation, are inclined to see the Premier League as a powerful rival.

It would be potentially disastrous for England if it were somehow to put Michel Platini’s nose out of joint, prompting the UEFA President publicly to endorse the bid of one of England’s European rivals.

So the Premier League’s global appeal is a weapon that must be wielded with great care and, for the moment at least, largely in private.

Used in the right way, though, the global web of contacts built up over many years by Premier League chairman Sir Dave Richards and his colleagues might just make all the difference.

One World Cup bid that I don’t expect to "do a Chicago" is, ironically, that from the US.

Mexico’s recent withdrawal – predicted here as long ago as June 1 leaves the US in glorious isolation as the sole bidder from CONCACAF, the snappily entitled Confederation of North, Central America and Caribbean Association Football.

That makes the task faced by CONCACAF leaders in the current bid race crystal clear: do everything in their power to ensure that one competition or the other takes place in the US.

What a contrast with the crowded fields from Europe and Asia, which have respectively four and five separate runners.

It so happens that CONCACAF has, in President Jack Warner (the man who touched off last week’s flurry of World Cup bid headlines), one of world football’s most adroit politicians.

But I reckon even I could land one of these World Cups for the US in these circumstances.

Put yourself in Warner’s position:

CONCACAF has three votes on FIFA's Executive Committee in its own right.

There are a further three votes from South America, the host confederation for 2014, some or all of whom might feel a sense of regional solidarity with their North American neighbours.

And, though one hopes that the process would be more dignified than this perhaps implies, wouldn't you expect the other bidding countries with Executive Committee members - there are SEVEN in all - to be turning their minds to how they can persuade CONCACAF members to vote for them once the US is out of the running, either because it has been eliminated or because it has won the right to stage the 2018 tournament?

With a US-based World Cup also certain to be a commercial success and to fire interest for the sport in a market that still has huge growth potential, it doesn’t appear that difficult to come up with the necessary 13 votes.

(It seems to me, incidentally, that in this dream scenario for the US, Warner is almost duty-bound to keep other bidders in the dark regarding his voting intentions at least for the time being, since such a strategy would probably leave him best-placed to extract pledges that could be of benefit to CONCACAF football.)

For whatever reason, a lot of people seem to think of the US as a likelier bet to stage the 2022 World Cup - and, looking at the bigger picture and the fact that the 2014 tournament is in Brazil, this may indeed be how it pans out.

My question, though, is as follows: given the favourable way in which the cookie has crumbled, what if the US wins the 2018 vote, as it assuredly could?

In a word, panic.

Though I still think more withdrawals are likely, as things stand today, you’d be left with an almighty scramble pitching four European bidders - Belgium/Holland, England, Russia and Spain/Portugal - against five from Asia - Australia, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea and Qatar.

And, though I'm sure FIFA would take a deep breath before turning its back on Europe for what would be a fourth-consecutive tournament, who is to say that the commercial security afforded by the US might not then embolden them to sail their flagship competition IOC-like into the virgin territory of Australia or even the Middle East?

How does that motto run? "For the Game. For the World".

Food for thought.

David Owen is a specialist sports journalist who worked for 20 years for the Financial Times in the United States, Canada, France and the UK. He ended his FT career as sports editor after the 2006 World Cup and is now freelancing, including covering last year's Beijing Olympics. An archive of Owen’s material may be found by Twitter users at www.twitter.com/dodo938