By Andrew Warshaw in Zurich
February 26 – Gianni Infantino secured a surprise second-round victory over Asian football supremo Sheikh Salman today to become the ninth Fifa president following Sepp Blatter’s 18-year reign and keep the post in European hands.
In a remarkable coup, Infantino, who will give up the role as UEFA general secretary, only entered the race when his boss Michel Platini had to pull out after being suspended in October – yet now has the enormous task of cleaning up football’s scandal-scarred world governing body, at least for the next three years and three months until the next election.
As anticipated the ballot went two rounds after none of the four remaining candidates following Tokyo Sexwale’s on-the-day withdrawal managed to achieve the required two-thirds majority.
Infantino and Salman were separated by only three votes in the first round – 88 to 85 – but the Swiss-Italian romped to victory when a simple majority was needed, taking 115 votes to Sheikh Salman’s 88.
Both Infantino and Salman had been supremely confident of victory going into the secret ballot yet had to wait several nail-biting hours before discovering which of them had been chosen to step into Blatter’s shoes and implement a wide-ranging set of far-reaching reforms.
Sheikh Salman will be devastated by the scale of his defeat as it became clear that, as so often with Fifa elections, promises were clearly not kept.
But in a supreme irony, it was Sheikh Salman’s Asian arch-rival Prince Ali bin al-Hussein of Jordan, between whom there is no love lost, who ultimately became the kingmaker and dashed the Bahraini’s hopes.
Prince Ali, who lost to Blatter in May yet decided to have another crack, secured just 27 first-round votes in the first round and a paltry four in the second. Almost his entire support base switched to Infantino, as did that of Jerome Champagne who picked up a mere seven first-round votes and none at all in round two.
All week the indications had been that Sheikh Salman would win in the second or maybe third round but after the narrow first round result, the strategy soon became clear as supporters of Prince Ali and Champagne managed to ensure that Salman would be snuffed out.
On being acclaimed as president , Infantino, whose plans include expanding the World Cup finals to 40 teams and making huge increases in development funds, promised: “We will restore the image of FIFA and everyone will applaud what we will do in the future together. The time has come to return to football. Football has gone through sad times; FIFA has gone through sad times.
“Now we must go forward. We need to implement the reforms and we need to win back the respect of the entire world through our hard work and commitment and finally, once again, focus on this wonderful, beautiful game that is football.”
Concacaf vice-president Capt Horace Burrell of Jamaica told InsideWorldFootball he was stunned by the eventual margin of Infantino;s victory. “To be honest Im still trying to fathom that out,” he said. “It was shocker because usually people split different ways. It was a huge swing.”
But it shortly became clear that the United States, which had backed Prince Ali in the first round, had played a pivotal role by working relentlessly between rounds to make sure his votes went to Infantino thereafter.
“We announced we were going to support Prince Ali. It took a long time for us to get to that point because we had two candidates we were very close to,” said US Soccer Federation president Sunil Gulati. “Gianni knew how much we thought of him. We told Gianni we would support Prince Ali but also gave him the assurance that when it mattered, if it mattered, we would be with him.”
“A lot of people had them within 10 votes of each other, somewhere between 70 and 90. That was right on the spot. I think quite a few of Jerome’s came over too and I think there were others that switched from Sheikh Salman to Gianni and that’s a double hit.
“We couldn’t give any message to Prince Ali’s supporters until we had talked to Prince Ali. In that intervening period, we had a good chat with Prince Ali and with Gianni.”
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