By Andrew Warshaw
January 25 – A number of European federations want more time before committing themselves to UEFA general secretary Gianni Infantino’s bid to succeed Sepp Blatter at next month’s FIFA presidential election, Insideworldfootball has learned.
Infantino’s campaign to lead FIFA out of its worst ever corruption crisis was boosted on Friday when he won the “overwhelming” backing of Europe’s 53 voting associations who met on the sidelines of an executive committee session at Uefa headquarters.
However, it is understood UEFA wanted to use the word “unanimous” instead of overwhelming but had to water down its statement when not all federations were prepared to agree on bloc support there and then.
Infantino, initially seen as a stop-gap contender, became a candidate in his own right after Michel Platini’s withdrawal from the race because of his eight-year ban and looks certain to win most of the European votes at the Feb 26 ballot.
But European football chiefs apparently refused to be “pressganged” into backing him until they have fully digested his manifesto which was published only days before last week’s gathering in Switzerland.
While the exco did express unanimous support for Infantino, those who really matter – the voting associations themselves – stopped short of doing likewise despite controversial Spanish veteran Angel Villar Llona, who chaired the meeting as Uefa’s senior vice president, trying to persuade them to register their bloc support.
“What they tried to do was to get all of us to unanimously support Gianni,” said one European federation chief. “Whilst there was majority support for Gianni, a number of us – maybe 20 percent of the membership – said we had to discuss all the candidates with our respective boards and couldn’t just be bounced into making a decision in a room.”
“Villar Lllona tried to pressgang everybody into making a decision but eventually had to climb down. They wanted to put out a statement saying we unanimously supported Gianni but had to put out a more diluted statement.”
It is also understood Infantino told the membership he had no intention whatsoever in striking a deal with Asian Football Confederation president Sheikh Salman Bin Ebrahim Al Khalifa, another of the FIFA presidential candidates, which would involve the Swiss pulling out of the race late on and transferring his support to Salman in order to end up working as his number two.
“Gianni made it abundantly clear to us that those days (of deal-making) are gone and that he was running for president and nothing else,” said the afore-mentioned federation chief.
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