By Andrew Warshaw
June 5 – FIFA’s controversial decision to replace its ethics and governance chiefs has burst back into the public arena, with UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin revealing that an official letter has been sent by his organisation to world football’s governing body complaining about the lack of communication over the decision-making process.
FIFA president Gianni Infantino has described the media outcry over the removal of Cornel Borbely and Hans-Joachim Eckert, who had come to the end of their terms having investigated and prosecuted a raft of corrupt officials, as a “storm in a teacup”. He was given immediate support in this view by CONCACAF’s Canadian president Victor Montagliani. But critics claim that FIFA broke its own statutes by not giving the pair four months’ notice.
German reports even alleged at the time that Eckert and Borbeley – respectively replaced by Greek judge Vassilios Skouris, who was president of the European Court of Justice from 2003 to 2015 and Colombian lawyer Maria Claudia Rojas – were on an initial list of 45 candidates, only for the list to be somehow whittled down – this time without their names on it – by the time it reached the FIFA Council in Bahrain.
Rojas was recently quoted as saying that she was only approached for the job a couple of weeks before Bahrain at the Conmebol Congress in Chile. “It was a short process,” she said. “I would never have believed that I would chair the committee.”
Reinhard Grindel, the German FA president recently elected by UEFA as one of its FIFA Council members, went out of his way in Bahrain to complain about the speed and lack of consultation with which the decision to replace Eckert and Borbely was taken.
Ceferin, who has so far kept his counsel on the matter, has disclosed that concerns were raised by his executive committee in Cardiff last week about the way in which FIFA’s various judicial gurus, who also included governance and review committee chief Miguel Maduro, were ousted at the FIFA Council meeting that preceded last month’s full Congress. Eckert and Borbely claim they only found out they had been removed from media reports as they changed planes on the way to Bahrain.
“We agreed at the executive committee that we (will) send a letter as UEFA to FIFA, that we want different procedures or we simply cannot work,” Ceferin told the BBC. “I hope and I expect that FIFA will change that attitude. Over communication, we want information far before the council meeting because otherwise it’s impossible to decide.
“Maybe they don’t know that that’s a problem. But they will know when they receive our letter.”
“We know what’s happened in the past at FIFA: there’s been a lot of upheaval, a lot of people leaving the organisation, and the public image has been severely damaged. It’s recovering slowly. But you know, with those ‘FIFA matters’, even our UEFA image was damaged. At the end, FIFA will have to change completely, or it will hurt all the football organisations around the world.”
Hard-hitting words and they didn’t stop there.
Ceferin also says he was unaware of concerns that North Korean workers were allegedly subject to human rights abuses while employed on a World Cup stadium in Russia.
Nordic associations had initially raised concerns and in a response reportedly sent to them by Infantino and leaked to several media outlets last week, the FIFA president acknowledged the “appalling” conditions of North Korean workers deployed at the Zenit Arena in St Petersburg which hosts the opening game of the upcoming Confederations Cup.
Ceferin, a FIFA vice-president and chairman of the organising committee for FIFA competitions, said he was disappointed he had not been informed of the situation by FIFA prior to it becoming public knowledge.
“Gianni Infantino wrote to some of the Nordic FA presidents to say that this had been uncovered . . . What also disturbs me is that we had to read about that through leaks in the media before we knew anything about it.”
“We didn’t know about any inspections, we didn’t know about any letters, we didn’t know about anything. It was the first time we knew about it, from the media. The first time! Which is strange. We are the biggest confederation, not just the biggest, but we are a confederation, and we should be informed.
“It was a big discussion at our executive committee, because the members of the UEFA exco and especially our members on the FIFA Council, are not satisfied, because we don’t get information soon enough.”
Ceferin made it clear his criticism was not directly personally towards Infantino but at FIFA’s way of communicating.
“This is not a criticism towards the president of FIFA, it’s a criticism against an organisation which is the world governing body of football and doesn’t give us very important information. In football communication is a big problem sometimes. You simply cannot work if you … are not informed properly.”
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