World Cup near miss will cost Wales millions – Noel Mooney

The failure to reach the 2026 World Cup will cost the Football Association of Wales millions of pounds and impact the mood of the nation, says the organisation’s chief executive Noel Mooney.

Wales suffered play-off semi-final despair on Thursday when Bosnia and Herzegovina prevailed in a penalty shoot-out in Cardiff.

Defeat denied Wales the chance to play at a second successive World Cup after reaching Qatar in 2022 – a tournament from which Mooney said the FAW were able to turn a “spare” £3.5million into £40-£50m over the last three years.

“The maths behind the World Cup was quite simple really because we got around 10m euro for getting there,” said Mooney, who explained to the Business of Sport podcast before Wales’ defeat that the pot was split three ways for logistics, player payments and developing football in the country.

“We had about £3.5m spare that we hadn’t budgeted for, so we created the Cymru Football Foundation which mirrored the Football Foundation in England.

“We set off on a journey to build up relationships and partnerships with governments and local authorities to turn that £3.5m into £40-£50m, which we’ve managed to do over the last three years. We’ve leveraged it massively.

“So that’s a massive legacy of building pitches every day, new dressing rooms, trying to cater for the massive growth in the girls’ game across Wales.

“At this moment we’re building multiple pitches and stadiums across the country, and the catalyst for that was qualifying for the World Cup in 2022.”

Wales would have profited even more from this summer’s World Cup in Canada, Mexico and the United States, with FIFA having increased prize money by 50 per cent for competing nations and provided additional cash to cover preparation costs.

It has been reported had Wales claimed one of the remaining places for the 48-team tournament, the minimum prize money alone of 9m US dollars would have equated to 20.8 per cent of its total revenue from a non-men’s tournament year.

Other commercial spin-offs would have also have boosted FAW coffers but Mooney – who says they did not budget for qualifying this summer – believes the impact of qualifying for a World Cup goes much further than the balance sheet.

He said: “The energy around the country when we qualify for World Cup or a Euros is so big it outweighs any financial impact for the Association because the whole country’s talking about you.

“Kids are wanting to play the sport and you can feel the surge of energy that runs through the country.

“The country comes to a stop when we qualify for major tournaments, so the whole mood of the game lifts as well.

“We’ve got 900 grassroots clubs and it’s their sport we are custodians of. When we qualify for things the mood of the nation is so much better but of course, we still have to manage the business side too.”