By Andrew Warshaw
February 4 – The five rivals running for FIFA president have agreed to hold a private summit in mid-February shortly before the February 26 election to succeed Sepp Blatter, according to FIFA’s Russian powerbroker Vitaly Mutko, one of the most influential figures in European football.
Mutko inadvertently spilled a rather large can of beans when he revealed to reporters that the meeting would take place on February 17 and 18 even though none of the candidates have ever publically mentioned such a gathering.
Mutko, who is also Russian Sports Minister and head of his federation, did not specify the venue for the talks involving Gianni Infantino, Prince Ali Bin Al Hussein, Tokyo Sexwale, Jerome Champagne and the current favourite, Sheikh Salman bin Ebrahim Al Khalifa.
But according to Tass, he discussed it during a phone call with Sheikh Salman.
“The candidates will speak out so we will have a real situation on the preparations for the election,” Tass quoted Mutko as saying, comments that will be of particular interest to broadcasters ESPN and the BBC who have both tried and failed in recent weeks to bring the candidates round the table.
Intriguingly, Champagne said in a memo to Insideworldfootball that while he had read media reports about the proposed discussions, he had not been “directly informed” which suggests that Mutko has been misinformed, misquoted or should not have made it public. Infantino’s office also said he was not aware of any planned meeting.
Earlier this week, Mutko announced that Russia would be backing Infantino at the election but in follow-up, somewhat cryptic comments appear to suggest that he would ideally prefer Salman, head of Asian football, to replace Blatter.
“If there was a single candidate from Asia and Europe we would have all backed him (Salman) up and had more chances,” said Mutko. “I want to stress one more time, that from Europe, Asia and Africa, there should be one candidate. We will be talking about this. After all, Asia also has its own candidate.”
“I have a small anxiety, that one of them (one of the candidates) will win with some small number of votes in advantage. I hope that it won’t happen so that who lost, will start preparing for the next elections. We are afraid of that. That’s why we are trying to do this work.”
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