By Paul Nicholson in New York
November 3 – FIFA presidential candidate Tokyo Sexwale, speaking in New York at the Securing Sport 2015 conference, said that he felt FIFA’s sponsors had gone too far in issuing an ultimatum that either current president Sepp Blatter must go or they will pull their funding.
Giving what he described as a “word of caution on sponsor activism”, he repeated previous criticism of statements from FIFA’s US-based sponsors McDonald’s, Budweiser, Coca-cola and VISA. “Sponsor activism is welcome. They have a right to speak but should be careful of how far they go. The(re are) unintended consequences of sponsor activism.”
“By saying this sponsors will be in a position to determine who runs FIFA.” Sexwale said, if president, he would “sit down with sponsors to say there is a way of doing these things,” pointing to the more measured approach of adidas who have called for reform but not entered into leadership demands.
Sexwale’s concern is FIFA president should be elected by the popular vote and should not be allowed to be controlled by sponsors.
If elected president, Sexwale said his first task at FIFA would be to “undo the crippling damage to the FIFA brand of these scandals. Damage done is affecting all stakeholders – fans, children, players, administrators.
“We in FIFA brought this on ourselves by failing to adhere to certain basic standards. It affects officials, sponsors, governments, media and the youth of the world,”
Sexwale’s view of the future is more in the role of an “executive president”. “Repairing (the reputation) cannot be done by one man – no one man can fix it,” he said. “It is a big organisation. ..it requires a leadership collective … and working in accordance with new FIFA reforms.”
He said his manifesto will be published in the next couple of weeks which will assess the damage done to the FIFA brand and how it can be fixed.
With the African confederation failing to have endorsed him at his first lobbying attempt, Sexwale said he is from Africa “but I think we are a family of football and I would like to see myself as president getting votes from all across the world”.
CONCACAF, and the Caribbean in particular, is expected to be fertile vote ground for Sexwale but he also said he is “looking forward to Asian [votes]. It doesn’t mean because Sheikh Salman is there… he may qualify for African votes in as much as I would like to qualify for Asia.”
In his address, Sexwale spent a long time talking about the threat of racism to football and his own Global Watch foundation and the initiatives it is putting in place. While these issues are important and relevant for a conference on integrity, he missed the opportunity to make a much bigger campaign trail statement on his vision for FIFA as he bids for the presidency.
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