January 9 – Campaigners pressing for greater reform at FIFA, including at least one of the candidates for FIFA president, are to converge on Brussels later this month to discuss how to bring about significant change. The meeting will take place at the European Parliament.
The forum on January 21, under the slogan ‘A New Fifa Now’, has been championed by British Member of Parliament Damian Collins, a vociferous and increasingly aggressive critic of the way football’s world governing body has been run, and will involve politicians, sports administrators and ex-players.
Delegates will include FIFA presidential candidate Jerome Champagne and Harold Mayne-Nicholls, Chilean head of the technical inspection team for the 2018 and 2022 World Cup bids who has yet to make up his mind whether to join Champagne in standing against Sepp Blatter.
Whilst the event is little more than another talk shop, the level of political involvement from outside football shows the extent to which the image of FIFA has taken a tumble.
“It’s the first of its kind where politicians, players, fans and corporations will come together in a campaign for change,” said Collins. “I speak to amateur and professional players, fans, and mums and dads whose children play and love the game. It has reached the stage where FIFA is a laughing stock. We all love the game. But we all detest how it’s run.”
Collins says the Brussels Summit will focus on how change can happen. “We don’t intend to talk about what is wrong with FIFA, as we all know what’s wrong.”
He then says: “The experience since the Presidential election in 2011 – when we were promised things would change – shows that FIFA is incapable of reforming itself. But we also know that FIFA’s problems go much further back than that.”
The concept of a conference to talk about changing an organisation without identifying to those present the problems that need changing is interesting. FIFA argues that reform has taken place and is still taking place, and beyond the ethics process that has dominated headlines recently. Which perhaps gives the summit more the feeling of a political rally than a serious discussion forum.
Interestingly the press release highlights English 2018 World Cup bid leader Lord David Triesmann as one of the speakers. Triesmann was heavily criticised in Judge Hans-Joachim Eckert’s summary of the Michael Garcia’s report on the investigatiuon into the 2018/2022 World Cup bidding process. The report is expected to be published in a fuller but redacted form later this year.
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