LIKE turkeys not voting for Christmas, FIFA’s report into allegations that the bidding process for the 2018 and 2022 Word Cups was corrupt has exonerated Russia and Qatar.

Move along, nothing to see here.

England, however, have been caught bang to rights over their wooing of FIFA official Jack Warner ahead of the 2018 bid declaration four years ago.

The report claimed the bid team “often accommodated Mr Warner’s wishes in apparent violation of bidding rules and the FIFA Code of Ethics’’.

Like the game itself at international level, it seems England aren’t very good at playing politics either.

Russia, when asked by investigator Michael Garcia to provide proof they were clean in the process, simply said their computers had caught fire. Qatar merely shrugged their shoulders and said they had done nothing wrong.

England were more forthcoming and have paid the price. Honesty, it would seem, is not always the best policy.

The Football Association openly travelled to Warner’s Trinidad and Tobago for a friendly in 2008 — a move that now looks naive.

Admitting you broke the rules but not as much as the others is not an excuse.

But it doesn’t get away from the fact that the whole thing stinks.

That Garcia, an independent American lawyer, says the findings he spent two years gathering have been misrepresented by Hans-Joachim Eckert, the chairman of the FIFA ethics committee, demonstrates as much.

So, what now?

Suggestions of a boycott for the 2018 World Cup in Russia are wide of the mark. Unless England are joined by other major European powers such as Germany, France, Spain and Italy, it would look like nothing more than sour grapes.

In any case, FIFA, and president Sepp Blatter in particular, have so much support elsewhere around the globe, they would likely call England’s bluff and carry on regardless.