MADRID (The Thursday Times) — The 2030 World Cup final will be played in Spain, the head of the Spanish Football Federation said on Saturday, rejecting any suggestion that the country could pull out of the tournament if co-host Morocco is given the showpiece match instead.
“There is no other plan than for the final to be held in Spain,” Rafael Louzán, president of the federation, known as the RFEF, said at a conference at its Ciudad del Fútbol headquarters on the outskirts of Madrid. He described Spain hosting the final as non-negotiable.
“I am not currently considering the possibility of withdrawing from Spain, as the prospect of Spain not hosting the final is not on the table,” he said.
Bernabéu or Casablanca
Spain, Portugal, and Morocco are joint hosts of the 2030 tournament, which will also open with three matches in South America to mark the World Cup’s centenary. Louzán said the venue for the final would be decided in 2028.
Spain wants the final at Real Madrid’s Santiago Bernabéu stadium. Portugal does not have a stadium large enough, while Morocco has put forward the Hassan II Stadium, a 115,000-seat ground being built at Benslimane near Casablanca that would be among the largest in the world.
Louzán said a delegation of FIFA technical experts had spent last week visiting the Spanish stadiums hoping to host matches during the tournament.
An election-year row
Louzán was answering Alberto Núñez Feijóo, leader of the opposition People’s Party. In a television interview on November 5, Feijóo said that if he became prime minister after Spain’s general election on November 29, he would argue for withdrawing Spain’s bid to host World Cup matches if Morocco were awarded the final.
Louzán called the question entirely hypothetical. “That notion simply doesn’t exist,” he said, adding that under FIFA’s tradition of rotating the World Cup between continents, staging the final “belongs to the European continent”.
FIFA has not yet said where the final will be played.
