Awarding consecutive World Cups to India make sense: FIH CEO

The decision to award hosting rights of the men's hockey World Cup to India for the second consecutive time in 2023 was purely based on merit, world body (FIH) CEO Thiery Weil said on Tuesday.

The International Hockey Federation (FIH) CEO Thiery Weil said that the decision of giving it to India instead of Malaysia, completely makes sense, considering the financial viability of the sport in a country like India.

"I am coming from another sport which is football, where whenever we orgainsed an World Cup, we have been extremely criticised to have created white elephants,' Weil said in a tele-conference with Indian journalists from Lausanne.

"So, in that sense I am extremely happy that we as a sport have decided to re-use venue like Bhubaneswar for the second time because there was a lot of effort and investment went in to build this venue, which currently to my knowledge is the best venue we have," he said.

India will, thus, become the first country to stage four men's Hockey World Cups after having hosted the showpiece in 1982 (Mumbai), 2010 (New Delhi) and 2018 (Bhubaneswar). The Netherlands' had hosted three men's tournaments.

"The bid was an open one. There were quite a lot of good bidders, including Malaysia. Actually it was decided taking into factor India's commercial relevance and high financial contribution. FIH needs financial revenues. India did an extremely good job of putting everything on table," Weil said.

"Some of the countries that bid didn't have infrastructure and needed huge investments. We made the decisions which make complete sense and completely viable for our sport."
"I totally believe and it is the mission of the FIH along with participating nations is to sell this product and make people understand it's not just another friendly game but the result of this game can lead a team to be the best team in a year, next to Olympics."