"I won't say that Brazil started too late [but] we are not advanced in Brazil," he told an audience in Russia, which will host the subsequent tournament in 2018.
"We don't have stadiums, we don't have airports, we don't have a national transportation system in place," he said during a keynote address to a football forum in Moscow.
"To deliver stadiums is the most important part... it's a lot of work. The Sao Paulo stadium is definitely not a World Cup stadium and that is why it is closed," Valcke said.
Valcke, effectively FIFA's number two and widely credited with the success of last year's tournament in South Africa, told the Moscow audience that Russia should aim to be ready by 2016 - two years before the tournament starts.
He declined to comment directly on the cash-for-votes scandal that surrounded FIFA's recent presidential election, adding only that it was "nice to talk about football" for a change.
Alexei Sorokin, chief executive of Russia's World Cup organising committee, told the forum the 2016 deadline was "absolutely realistic," despite having to build or renovate every stadium.
"We have to build a lot. We have never hid the fact that we do not have a single stadium that is up to FIFA standards," he said.
"We are motivating stadium owners to attract as much private investment as possible. It is meant to be profitable," he said.
He played down fears about racism in Russia as "not representative of the general mood" but admitted it was "difficult to control."
