By Andrew Warshaw
January 27 – In what can only be described as a state of utter confusion, a planned debate on the future of FIFA, which had already descended into farce, was watered down still further today just hours before it was due to take place.
Twenty-four hours after ESPN pulled the plug on globally televising the event when two of the three presidential candidates who had originally accepted an invitation changed their minds, the three-hour forum was scrapped by one of the organisers and replaced by a briefer press conference.
Prince Ali bin al-Hussein of Jordan, South Africa’s Tokyo Sexwale and former FIFA senior executive Jérôme Champagne had all been due to appear at the European parliament in Brussels to discuss the future of football’s scandal-tarnished world governing body and what they would do to put things right.
Those plans were dashed when Prince Ali, currently campaigning among South American delegates, informed the joint organisers – the European parliament’s Sports Intergroup and the NewFifaNow pressure group – that he would be unable to attend, saying he had learned that doing so might constitute a breach of electoral rules. When he heard that Prince Ali had pulled out, Sexwale followed suit.
Right up until the last minute, the forum was still due to go ahead, with Champagne left as the lone keynote speaker in front of a group of European parliamentarians. But the status of the event was further diluted when it became clear there was no longer any point in staging a fully-blown dialogue, with frustrated journalists who had made the trip to Brussels expecting to hear the first ever presidential debate invited instead to a press conference involving Champagne and a handful of European members of Parliament at a different location within the same building.
A statement from the Sports Intergroup said the switch had been made “because of the change in the programme … due to the last-minute withdrawal of certain candidates.”
But just to add even more confusion to a ludicrous situation, British MP Damian Collins (pictured), who heads NewFifaNow, disputed the statement from his fellow organisers, saying his organisation had not approved the wording and insisting the forum had not been ditched at all. “It is not a press conference, it is a forum with an agenda,” Collins told Insideworldfootball. “This is not our understanding of what the event is.”
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