PORT LOUIS: Britain’s once-untouchable position on FIFA’s executive committee will be swept away after 67 years at this week’s reform-driven Congress of world soccer’s governing body.
England, and to a lesser extent Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, have had a love-hate relationship with FIFA from the time it was formed in 1904 and none of them were among the founding fathers.
This has been due partly to the permanent vice-president’s seat on the executive committee that Britain enjoys, but that seat is to be handed back at the Congress in Mauritius.
The affable Jim Boyce of Northern Ireland will be the last British vice-president and he is not unhappy about the change.
“The time has come, it was a bit of an anachronism, but I do not think our influence will be diminished in the slightest,” he said yesterday.
FIFA has six vice-presidents and the removal of the British one should go some way to placating nations who have long regarded Britain, and the English in particular, with suspicion.
The English Football Association, the world’s first, was founded in 1863, some 41 years before FIFA, and is celebrating its 150th anniversary this year.
The British associations collectively dismissed the idea of joining FIFA at the outset and the repercussions of this aloofness still resonate to this day.
Two years ago at the Congress in Zurich, FIFA vice-president Julio Grondona of Argentina called the English “pirates” after they attempted to delay the election of Sepp Blatter as president for a fourth term.
A number of delegates took the floor to berate the English for suggesting the vote should be delayed because Blatter was standing unopposed in the wake of Qatari Mohamed Bin Hamman’s withdrawal from the presidential race in May 2011. REUTERS
