The 2018 campaign’s inclusion of the Olympic Stadium exposes a bitter dispute over its future after the Games

The smouldering controversy over the viability of London’s 2012 Olympic stadium will reignite tomorrow when the stadium is formally proposed as a football venue, still at 80,000 seats six years after the Games, should the Football Association bring the 2018 World Cup to England. That directly challenges the way the stadium is even now being constructed, at a cost of £537m of public money, which is that all 52,000 seats in its upper tier will be removed once the Olympics are over, leaving the stadium as a permanent 28,000-seat athletics venue.

That design, approved by the government, is intended to ensure there are no expensive “white elephants” left unoccupied when the Olympics have left town. Critics, particularly in Boris Johnson’s London mayor’s office, point out that an athletics stadium of that size will be full on only one or two days a year, and so public money will be required indefinitely to maintain it. Those concerns led to an official review of its future, being carried out by the new Olympic Park Legacy Company, whose chair, Margaret Ford, has spoken of boosting the sporting legacy at Stratford, and said “nothing is ruled in or out at this stage”.

A spokesman for London United, the body submitting the capital’s 2018 World Cup bid, said yesterday that the Olympic Stadium is being included “subject to the decision on capacity”.

The suggestion that the stadium could be retained with 80,000 seats until 2018 is, however, dismissed as fanciful by government sources. Tessa Jowell, the Olympics minister, is said to put the cost at £100m to £150m, because as well as ongoing maintenance, corporate and other spectator facilities would have to be built into the upper tier, and segregation of fans organised, to fit Fifa’s World Cup requirements. One source dismissed the idea as “the economics of the madhouse”.

Jowell and other supporters of the stadium’s current design argue that it is a good compromise solution to the immovable dilemma of what to do with a prestige stadium once the event for which it was built is over. At 28,000 seats, it will be a high-class venue which will fulfil the pledge given by Lord Coe to the International Olympic Committee that a London Games will leave a solid athletics legacy. There will be community and educational use, with a school, a National Skills Academy and a branch of the English Institute for Sport residing within the building.

Opponents object to the need for more public money to maintain it after 2012, with no permanent occupant of the stadium itself having been secured so far – three years of talks with Leyton Orient and Saracens came to nothing. Insiders put the ongoing cost at £1m a year, and even some who see merit in the current downscaled plan also cringe that this modest venue is all London will be left with for its £537m.

For the critics, the preferred post-Olympics life was – and still is in some hopeful quarters – for West Ham United to occupy the stadium, reduced to, say, 50,000 seats. That would follow the principle applied after Manchester’s 2002 Commonwealth Games, where the athletics track was removed and the stadium’s spectator facilities converted to become Manchester City’s new home. London’s Olympic organisers have come up against that immovable law of sport in this country, that above even 20,000 seats only senior professional club football can regularly fill a stadium, and so pay the cost of its maintenance.

That model was resisted in London partly due to a lingering feeling that the handover of a £120m lottery- and taxpayer-funded stadium in Manchester was too generous to a Premier League football club rich on TV and other glittering revenue. The stadium was indeed a windfall for City and ultimately a prime reason why Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan decided to buy the club and sink his oil dirhams into it. Manchester city council’s chief executive, Sir Howard Bernstein, argues, however, that “It was always a good deal”, because City took all the maintenance costs off the public purse. City signed up to share with the council all ticket revenues above 32,000 sold, the old Maine Road capacity, which has delivered around £13m back to the council, for reinvestment in Manchester sport, since City took over in 2003.

In London, though, the government and other public authorities formed an early view that a track had to be maintained permanently because of Coe’s pledge to the IOC, and that no gift horse would be ridden to West Ham’s door. Richard Caborn, the former sports minister, worked intently on securing West Ham as tenants post-Olympics – the outline of a deal was discussed in which the club offered to pay £100m to occupy and convert the stadium for football use – but the government was never keen and it broke down in the detail.

Sources close to Jowell now point to West Ham’s financial meltdown, following the insolvency of Bjorgolfur Gudmundsson, the club’s former owner, and say that had they agreed to base the stadium’s design and post-Olympic future on a deal with the club, the whole project might now be in doubt.

Yet still, there remains a belief within Johnson’s office that occupation by West Ham could deliver a sustainable future, and Ford is under pressure to suggest it. That, however, ignores the concrete, steel and plastic facts, that the stadium is not being constructed with that afterlife in the design. The upper tier has no bars, corporate boxes or even toilets, and no English football club has so far wanted to occupy a stadium with a running track around the pitch. For £100m, West Ham could comfortably adapt Upton Park or build a new stadium, should a new owner with money be found to buy them from the Icelandic bank Straumur, which effectively repossessed the club.

It was natural for Johnson, once he took office, and Ford to review the stadium’s design because it will cost money to maintain and can be viewed as a limp sporting legacy. Some involved with the process say this outcome was arrived at partly because of London drawing up its plans and having to begin construction in a hurry, since Coe’s team did not actually expect to win the Olympics when they bid in 2005.

The government and sporting establishment should, though, stretch their memories further back than that. The new Wembley, for which £100m of lottery money was contributed, was intended to be a national stadium, built for regular football internationals and the FA Cup final, but capable of hosting a major athletics event. That plan crumbled following an internecine row about whether Wembley should have retractable seating over the track, or a platform to be specially constructed if an Olympics or World Athletics Championships should ever come to London.

So Wembley was built for £757m with no athletics facility and now struggles under the weight of its debt. A further £537m had to be spent on a stadium specifically for the Olympics, and the latest thought to give it some life afterwards is to maintain it expensively at 80,000 seats – for international