James Lawton: Stadium will be an overpriced monument to a failure of nerve, organisation and pride

for most of its life, the old Wembley stadium was a slum. When it died on a rain-lashed October afternoon in 2000 it was entirely appropriate that England should lose, dismally, to Germany, the team they had beaten 34 years earlier to record the nation's only World Cup triumph.

It was as if a judgement had been handed down on the will and the spirit and even the basic know-how of the country which had given the world its most popular game.

Unfortunately, yesterday's announcement that the plans and financial arrangements are finally in place for the new stadium to rise in 2006 – a disgraceful 11 years after bids were first invited – does little to dissipate the sense of an abject failure of nerve, organisation and pride. How else can you interpret, for example, the fact that most of the financing – £426m – is coming from a German bank and that another £120m of the astonishing total cost of £750m will be provided by Lotto punters.

This is nearly four times the cost of Cardiff's Millennium arena, the national stadium of a country that has a moribund rugby team and less than a handful of lower-division football clubs.

When the beautiful Stade de France was built in scarcely a year before the start of the 1998 World Cup, largely because of the thrust of the French government, there were English sneers about the hasty conversion of the former site of toxic waste. That reaction seemed particularly risible when this time last year the Culture and Sport Secretary, Tessa Jowell, publicly speculated on whether there was really a need for a national stadium. That was six years into the project. Adam Crozier, the chief executive of the Football Association – a Scotsman, incidentally – said there was indeed a need unless England wanted to join a few banana republics and Italy, which has glorious stadiums in most of its major cities, in having a national team with no place to call home.

The decision to remake Wembley is surely right. Despite those Victorian conditions, the plastic seats and the stomach-wrenching lavatory facilities, the old stadium had a unique aura. Long after England had become a relatively minor football power beside Brazil and Germany and Italy, Wembley was still the place to play and experience, and however worthy the claims of Coventry and Birmingham and Sheffield, the choice of any of them would still have seemed a needless abandonment of a great tradition. Now the famous twin towers will be re-placed by an "arch of triumph."

But a triumph for what? Only the kind of vertiginous bureaucracy and muddled thinking that produced the absurd Millenium Dome. It means the declaration of a new Wembley, delayed and thus grotesquely overpriced, is a matter not so much of celebration but relief. Three months after the success of the World Cup of Japan and South Korea, where shining new stadiums seemed to grow as quickly as bamboo shoots, any other reaction here would surely be pathetic.

All we have proved is that, finally, we are up to building one stadium of our own. Just give us 11 years and a load of German money. Perhaps the champagne should stay in the fridge.