By Andrew Warshaw
February 5 – Asian football supremo Sheikh Salman bin Ebrahim Al-Khalifa’s control over his huge region has been underlined with the surprise decision to hold this year’s 47-nation Asian Football Confederation congress in his native Bahrain.
InsideWorldFootball has learned that Asian federations were recently contacted in writing telling them that the April 30 summit will be held in Bahrain and not in Kuala Lumpur where the AFC is based.
That means delegates will instead convene in Salman’s own backyard on the very day he is standing for re-election as president.
Currently Salman is running unopposed for the most powerful position in Asian football. The deadline for nominations is at the end of this month and the decision to hold the congress in Bahrain is being viewed in some quarters as a deliberate attempt by Salman, who only took over in 2013, to cement his power base and further his credentials as the man to lead Asian football through the next four years.
Back in October, Alex Soosay, the AFC’s general secretary, told InsideWordFootball that the election would “almost certainly” take place in Kuala Lumpur. But the decision to switch it instead to Bahrain, giving Salman crucial home advantage against anyone daring to take him on, mirrors the last time the Congress was held away from the AFC’s home.
That was in 2011 when Mohamed Bin Hammam was re-elected unopposed as AFC president in his native Qatar. A short time later, bin Hammam announced he was bidding for the presidency of Fifa, only to have his career in football administration cut short as a result of the infamous cash-for-votes scandal and, separately, alleged financial misdemeanours within the AFC which he always denied.
As well as Salman’s AFC presidency, three Asian Fifa executive committee seats will also be contested in Bahrain, with a number of existing and new candidates vying for power. But Fifa presidential hopeful Prince Ali bin al-Hussein of Jordan will not be one of them, having already announced that he will not be running, preferring to concentrate on his challenge to Sepp Blatter at the end of May.
