Video: Keeping bid team in-house cost the Football Association dear, insists Caborn

Caborn, who served as Gordon Brown's ambassador for the bid until the general election in May, believes the national sport's governing body have let the country down by ignoring the successful blueprint laid down by the London 2012 Olympic bid team.

London 2012 split their interests into three stakes shared between the Mayor of London, the British Olympic Association and the Government and appointed a professional bid team, headed by Barbara Cassani, to operate underneath them.

The FA kept everything in-house, as they did when they failed to land the 2006 World Cup.

For Caborn – who in his time as Minister for Sport supported the 2005 Burns Report into the structure of the FA – that was a foolish mistake to repeat and should, he believes, lead to another thorough investigation into the running of the game in this country.

"We won the Olympics, but they wouldn't accept our help and they've gone and blown it – again," blasted an angry Caborn yesterday.

"The FA has got to look at itself. That's the issue to be debated here.

"There are a number of reasons why the bid failed, the main one of which is the set-up of the company.

"The 2012 Olympic bid had a professional structure which took the power out of the governing body's hands and there were calls for a similar set-up with the England bid team, but the FA chose to keep it within the FA.

"The Burns report ordered a review of the FA, said it had to change, bring in an independent chair and two non-executive directors.

"We tried to get the FA to change and we may well conclude now that they are incapable of change."

Caborn played a pivotal role in the landing of the 2012 Olympics but attributes the success of that bid to the external operators the 2012 board appointed.

Cassani headed a team that included Mike Lee, who also worked on the successful 2016 Rio de Janiero Olympic bid and was celebrating in Zurich again last night after helping the middle east country of Qatar, a relative newcomer to the world of football, land the 2022 World Cup.

"They (the FA) could have had Mike Lee, but chose not to," said Caborn, who also felt the investigations by the BBC's Panorama programme and the Sunday Times into FIFA may have worked against the England bid team.

"Did we get this wrong? What role did the media play – the Panorama and Sunday Times allegations?

"To me, with England being knocked out first, that shows a touch of vindictiveness, there's no doubt about it.

"The fact that we went out first shows we clearly didn't do what the committee wanted.

"It's very disappointing. "I'm surprised Russia got it, I thought that if we didn't win it, Spain and Portugal would have done."

England gained only two votes from FIFA's 22-man executive committee with the bid's staggering defeat generating concerns that the British media turned voters against them.

There will be calls for investigations into world football's governing body, but Caborn believes FIFA have already begun their own internal cleansing.

"FIFA is a different issue," he said. "They set up an ethics committee in 2006 and following the Sunday Times investigation earlier this year, two of the executive committee members were suspended.

"FIFA have taken steps. The IOC (International Olympic Committee) did so after Salt Lake City (a number of IOC members resigned after accepting bribes for votes). They restructured themselves.

"FIFA can take a leaf out of the IOC's book."