The point isn't that the vote itself was held in the middle of the World Cup, the point is that the time during which the public would have had informed itself

The point isn't that the vote itself was held in the middle of the World Cup, the point is that the time during which the public would have had informed itself about the issue and news coverage might have featured it overlapped with the time during which headlines are typically dominated by the World Cup. This isn't unusual and it doesn't take a conspiracy theorist to see a pattern. In fact, if you don't want too much public scrutiny, this is exactly what you would want to do. Actually Germany provides a good example for where this might work because historically Germany always made it past the group stage and Germans in general tend to follow their World Cup coverage fairly closely -- and it would have worked this time, too, hadn't it been for those meddling South Koreans.