By Andrew Warshaw
November 18 – Domenico Scala, the official who has taken centre stage amid the unfolding corruption crisis at Fifa, and Alexei Sorokin, ceo of Russia’s 2018 World Cup organising committee, are the standout speakers at the annual International Football Arena conference in Zurich tomorrow.
The one-day conference takes place this year at FIFA headquarters amid what is expected to be tight security.
Scala, chairman of FIFA’s audit and compliance unit, also heads the electoral committee that has overseen who is and who isn’t eligible to run for the Fifa presidency. He is also the key figure in pushing Fifa’s reform agenda and has submitted a radical blueprint for change including term limits for all senior administrators.
Scala will be on a panel discussing “Are world sports and their mega events losing their credibility?” and his comments are bound to provide considerable insight from the front line of the battle to clean up FIFA.
Originally FIFA president Sepp Blatter was scheduled to top the bill but the terms of his current suspension prevent him from taking part.
Sorokin will update delegates on his country’s preparations for the next World Cup but seems bound to address the doping scandal that has rocked Russian athletics and the credibility of Russian sport in general.
By a bizarre quirk of timing (or perhaps deliberate), the IFA conference takes place on the same day and at the same venue as FIFA’s Reform Committee, led by former Olympics guru Francois Carrard, which is meeting for the third time to fine-tune proposals to present to next month’s FIFA executive committee.
Whilst they share many of the same ideas, Scala and Carrard do not entirely see eye to eye in terms of which recommendations to put forward and it will be intriguing to see whether their paths cross in the corridors of FIFA House.
Carrard’s team includes one of the candidates for the FIFA presidency, Gianni Infantino. Although the UEFA general secretary will be there officially to discuss the reform process only, it will present him with an ideal opportunity to hold private discussions with senior members of other confederations about possible collaboration in the race to take over from Blatter on February 26 next year.
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