By Andrew Warshaw
August 4 – A gaping hole in FIFA’s day-to-day administration has finally been filled with Fabrice Jouhaud taking on the role of Chief Communications Officer “following a thorough recruitment process”.
Jouhaud, formerly CEO at L’Équipe 21, a privately held sports TV channel, starts work on August 15 and will be directly responsible to FIFA’s new secretary general Fatma Samoura.
Jouhaud replaces Walter De Gregorio, who resigned last year in bizarre circumstances after making a joke on television about Sepp Blatter and FIFA’s corruption-ravaged crisis.
For a year, FIFA’s communications activities, in public though perhaps not in private, have been handled by de Gregorio’s former number two, Nicolas Maingot, aided and abetted by long-term loyal head of media relations Delia Fischer.
The pair or the them have been somewhat hamstrung by FIFA’s ongoing corruption scandal in terms of what they have been allowed to dissiminate but both are understood to be retaining their respective roles under Jouhaud who will have his work cut out trying to restore media trust in an organisation whose credibility has been seriously undermined.
FIFA confirmed that Jouhaud would be part of its management board. First among his tasks, perhaps, is flagging up the credentials of Gianni Infantino whose own position as president has been seriously compromised by a number of allegations of ethics breaches, with the world still waiting for some kind of statement from FIFA’s ethics committee one way or the other.
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