By Andrew Warshaw
January 28 – Harold Mayne-Nicholls became the first prospective FIFA presidential candidate to pull of the race to take on Sepp Blatter today – 24 before the deadline for nominations. On the same day Portuguese icon Luis Figo announced his was standing, Mayne-Nicholls told a televised news conference that he had decided against doing the same because he simply didn’t have the necessary credentials.
Last week, in an exclusive interview with Insideworldfootball, Mayne-Nicholls said he could easily acquire the five letters of support he would have needed from among FIFA’s 209 member countries but gave the broadest hint yet that he would probably not put his name forward.
And so it proved as the Chilean withdrew his name from the election process. “In the end I’ve decided not to move forward with my candidacy,” he said.
Figo was the latest to throw his hat in the ring alongside Blatter, Prince Ali Bin Al-Hussein of Jordan, former FIFA official Jerome Champagne of France, Michael Van Praag, president of the Dutch FA; and rank outsider David Ginola, the former French international.
Not all of them are expected to remain in the race once the Thursday night deadline passes and FIFA have processed the various applications. But Mayne-Nicholls never even got that far, realising he did not stand a hope of winning.
“Faced with such candidates who are much more powerful than me without a doubt, my possibilities of being a candidate seem very weak,” he said.
Mayne-Nicholls, former head of the Chilean FA, was the man appointed by FIFA to lead its technical inspection team into the 2018 and 2022 World Cup bidding candidates. His report cautioned against staging the latter event in Qatar but was ultimately ignored as the Gulf state was selected.
Mayne-Nicholls has used every opportunity since to explain why that was a flawed decision when it was clear the tournament could not possibly be staged in the middle of the searing Gulf summer. Next month, more than four years after Qatar was chosen, FIFA experts are expected to rubber-stamp holding 2022 in winter for the first time in World Cup history.
Lurking uncomfortably in the background for Mayne-Nicholls has been the fact that he is one of five officials under investigation by FIFA’s ethics committee over alleged wrongdoing during the World Cup bid process. The Chilean is being scrutinised over an apparent request for some of his family members to gain unpaid work experience at Qatar’s Aspire academy. He insists the inquiry is a sham and that such conduct broke no rules either legally or morally. But being sanctioned in the run-up to the FIFA presidential election, if he had been a candidate lobbying for support, would have hardly have enhanced his image.
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