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Hard work can win World Cup bid - Beckham
16:45, Dec 3 2009
David Beckham insisted on Thursday that England can win the right to host the 2018 World Cup - but only with a lot of hard work.
The England midfielder has emerged as the figurehead of the 2018 campaign and top-level talks with FIFA president Sepp Blatter and vice-president Jack Warner on Wednesday will be followed by meetings with the four African members of FIFA's executive committee on Friday.
England's bid was thrown into turmoil by a series of events in the past six weeks but Beckham said: "There has been some negative stuff said about the bid but you can be sure people are working hard to get this for the country."
He added: "We can win the campaign with hard work. Nothing in life is easy, you have to work for special things to be given to you.
"England is one of the few countries with its stadia and its infrastructure that could host a World Cup almost immediately, next week. The diversity of cultures around our country is a big thing as well.
"There are not many countries where you can have Brazil and Portugal and so on coming to our country and for there to be lots of their fans already there. That's a special thing for us.
"We have one of the biggest leagues in the world but you can't get over-confident that just because we have that we will automatically be given the World Cup. It takes more than that to win a World Cup (bid). The positives are there but there is still a lot of hard work to be done."
Beckham, who was also a bid ambassador for the London 2012 Olympics, said England's footballing heritage and the FA's international development work were both vitally important to the bid.
He added: "Football is in our culture, in our DNA, it's in us from the moment we are brought into this world, from when we are born and that's something we will always have.
"We also want to create a legacy as grass-roots football is so important for everybody and what's going on here [in the township] is one of things and something we should be proud of."
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