By Andrew Warshaw
January 8 – Just days after he announced that he was taking on Sepp Blatter for the FIFA presidency, Prince Ali Bin Al-Hussein has his first opportunity on Friday to gauge how much support he might get from within his own region.
In effect, Prince Ali’s lobbying campaign starts in his own backyard – not his native Jordan but the entire Asian continent.
All eyes will be on the 39-year-old reformist FIFA vice-president when he takes his seat at the Asian Football Confederation’s extraordinary congress in Melbourne that precedes the start of the Asian Cup.
Prince Ali knows that if the vote were taken now, he would lose. Suggestions that he might end up getting within 30 votes of Blatter among FIFA’s 209 federations seem wide of the mark depending how many reformist candidates ultimately end up standing since all of them would be canvassing support, a strategy that could play into the hands of Blatter.
With AFC president Sheikh Sheikh Salman bin Ebrahim Al Khalifa of Bahrain making his support for Blatter abundantly clear and urging his confederation to do the same, Prince Ali’s task will be to try and convince as many delegates as possible among the AFC’s 46 voting federations to switch sides and that his is the best way forward.
In Melbourne it will be about taking diplomatic initial soundings but in time he will need a proper manifesto. Talk of the need for greater accountability and credibility is one thing and while Prince Ali has gone to great lengths to take a stand against corruption, improve grassroots football and embrace corporate social responsibility, the highly savvy and educated head of Jordanian football knows he will need a detailed programme to wrest votes away from those who are solidly behind Blatter as well as any floaters who may prefer to adopt the “better the devil you know than the devil you don’t” attitude.
Asia is so vast and allegiances so dependent on geopolitics that Prince Ali will need to find a way to show Salman loyalists that he has what it takes to take both his Continent and FIFA forward on and off the pitch.
It’s a tough call given that only last summer Prince Ali lost a power battle when Asian countries voted in favour of a proposal by Sheikh Salman to combine his own position with that of Asia’s FIFA vice-presidency, effectively stripping Prince Ali of a role he deeply covets.
The extraordinary congress is not only about the FIFA election, however.
Controversially, delegates will be asked to support a Salman-backed amendment that no longer reserves one of the AFC’s vice president positions exclusively for women, a role currently held by Australian lawyer Moya Dodd.
It’s a contentious issue, especially with FIFA keen to promote women administrators.
But Dodd, keen to play the diplomat with the Congress and the Asian Cup in her own country, attempted to play down the radical step on her Facebook page, making it clear that congress would also hear a proposal to create a fifth regional grouping of nations that would, numerically speaking, increase women’s positions from four to five.
“While there will no longer be a designated female Vice President in AFC, this package of amendments means that there will be an additional woman at the AFC ExCo table, and the proportion of women will increase from 4 out of 24, to 5 out of 25,” she wrote.
“AFC will be the first international football governing body to mandate fully 20% of its ExCo membership as female. This is a new benchmark in gender equity for football governance.”
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