The FA was offered the chance to buy votes for its 2006 World Cup bid, a revelation that will cause alarm as England sets about trying to land the 2018 finals. The governing body, backed by the Government, plans to spend about £15 million on the bid but must hope that the refusal to countenance bribes does not cause those efforts to be undermined.

The disclosure that the FA was asked for cash for votes has been made by David Davies, the former executive director, in his new book, FA Confidential. “A bribe. An irregular payment. A sweetener. Call it what you like, those of us at the FA who heard this corrupt proposal were shocked,” he writes.

The call was made by a middleman “well-connected in international footballing circles” — the lawyers have prevented Davies from saying who — to Adam Crozier, the former chief executive. The man was asked to ring back twice to verify the offer so that the FA could take the evidence to Fifa, football’s world governing body. “To this day I have no knowledge of what they did or didn’t do about it,” Davies said.

Fifa’s record on tackling internal corruption is poor, to say the least, raising more troubling questions about the fairness of any bidding process. “We were not left in any doubt,” Davies goes on. “Financial sweeteners could help bring in 2006 votes. Some other countries could take short cuts, could walk in the sport’s shadows. Not us. We were the FA, guardians of the game’s spirit and ethics. However pompous that mission statement can sound, it defined our attitude.”

Yesterday, Davies again declined to name the shadowy figure who went to the FA trying to sell votes — he would say only that the individual was foreign and was not a member of the Fifa executive committee — but he reiterated his belief that it was a genuine offer. “It was an experience that you would not forget,” he said. “And we wrote it all down.”

England lost out to Germany for the 2006 World Cup, although it is unlikely that the Germans would have needed to buy votes, given that their bid was always far more strongly backed by the hierarchy of Uefa and Fifa.

Now the FA is advertising for a chief executive to head the 2018 bid. England is regarded as the early front-runner. Davies expects strong rivalry from Australia, but Fifa may regard Europe as a safe bet after tournaments in South Africa in 2010 and Brazil in 2014. Russia and Spain have also declared an interest, although England, which has not hosted the tournament since the national team were victorious in 1966, has been quickest out of the blocks, even though the vote will not be taken by the executive committee until 2011.

“Having failed in the past, the FA almost certainly must win over Sepp Blatter [the Fifa president],” Davies, who left the FA in 2006 to work on various consultancies, said. Great efforts are being made to win over Blatter’s closest allies, including Jack Warner, a vice-president, who welcomed the England team to Trinidad and Tobago this summer — a trip for which the FA was willing to make a financial loss, to the consternation of some board members.

There are widespread concerns at how far the organisation will bend over to secure votes and Davies has admitted that some of the lavish spending on the bidding process — with Fifa’s 2006 inspectors being put up in Claridge’s, flown around by royal helicopter and treated to a lavish banquet at Hampton Court — will be seen as an extravagance. “What is involved does stick in the throat of people in this country, but we are either in it or we’re not,” he said. “You can’t ask people to come from the other side of the world and give them a pie and a pint.

“I will not countenance any form of buying votes. Having said that, sometimes we are over precious. For example, the Germans have used sport as a tool of foreign policy and international development around the world for many years. We worked with them on revitalising football in Afghanistan. There was no issue about them getting the money. We had to fight tooth and nail.”

FA Confidential — Sex, Drugs and Penalties. The Inside Story of English Football is published by Simon & Schuster, £17.99