By Paul Nicholson
May 5 – FIFA’s revamp of its development programmes in 2013 and the changes in the regulations have made the year a big one for FIFA’s a team that has been responsible for spending $500,000 a day on development activity and corporate social responsibility projects.
The new rules have taken a lot of communication – 175 member associations have been briefed to date via a seminar programme that has run 10 times so far – and will place much more stringent requirements on member associations than was previously the case.
Speaking to FIFA.com, FIFA Director of Member Associations and Development, Thierry Regenass said the process of communication has been challenging and that some member associations will be challenged by the new regulations.
“A small number of member associations will have to change some of their governance mechanisms to be able to comply to our requirements, both on the standard statutes side, and on our auditing requirements for the FIFA development programmes.” said Regenass.
“This is and will be a challenge, for instance we indirectly require all MAs to have an annual general assembly that needs to approve financial statements, and certain MAs only have bi-annual assemblies, which does not comply with the FIFA standard statutes. So this is an example of a relatively important change introduced that we will need to accompany the MAs on.”
Asked how can FIFA avoid further cases like the situation with the Antigua And Barbuda Football Association that was recently sanctioned for taking out a $1.1 million mortgage secured against its training centre that had already been granted more than $1.3 million of GOAL funding, Regenass said: “The introduction of the new development regulations is one step. But a case like the one in Antigua And Barbuda is also representative of a period and context that has significantly evolved, both on FIFA’s side and on the member associations’ side.”
“Both FIFA and the associations have learned through 15 years of the Financial assistance from FIFA – what are the challenges, where are the priorities and so on… we also observe a general improvement from 15 years ago, and while we can’t guarantee that no ‘bad projects’ will ever happen again, we are also quite confident that we won’t see too much of these.”
Avoiding ‘bad projects’ and the resulting bad publicity both within the organisation and outside it is important for the credibility and legitimacy of a massive development programme that in January crossed the $1 billion funding mark spent on its members.
“With the FAP (financial assistance programme), many associations have been able to develop their presence, their legitimacy as a national body of football; This, for us, is the biggest achievement, because the member associations are the number one pillar of football, the element in the football pyramid which links everything together'” said Regenass.
“We also have to mention the other big achievement from the last 15 years of football development support by FIFA which is the volume of pitches and football infrastructure that we have funded over the years. We have built more than 250 pitches around the world.
“However, the downside to these figures is that, even after 15 years, we still observe that a very large number of associations depend very much on FIFA’s financial support for their cash flow. One could take pride in that – FIFA in essence allows MAs to function, period – but very honestly, we would prefer to not be able to say that and have all 209 members use the FAP as an additional source of income, but unfortunately we are quite far from there yet.”
FIFA has recently begun a number of initiatives for its less-privileged member associations based on an the income generation scheme. For example, FIFA financed a solar panel electrical system for the Guam FA that reduced their electrical bills to zero. More than 71 associations are eligible for this programme and to date 63 projects have been approved in the 2011-2014 cycle .
Asked whether there are more stories like the development progress made in Afghanistan and Somalia, Regenass said: “We have more and more ‘feel-good’ stories and this is one of the things that encourages us to do more for football development…The important thing is that the structure of football improves generally speaking. This might be on the governance side – Indonesia comes to mind; on the management side – Mauritania or Ecuador for instance; or more obviously, on the football pitch: we have had great stories during the cycle with Ethiopia, Cape Verde, Rwanda, American Samoa to name a few.
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