"The Other Sheikh"

Day -978. ‪WorldCup2018‬.

Fifa: a couple of attempted steps forward, one staggering step kind-of backwards. The Fifa Executive Committee met today to discuss reforms and the way forward. One of the decisions was that the Ethics Committee will be more trasparent by publishing details of any ongoing proceedings. The ExCo also confirmed that the presedential elections will go ahead on February 26th, despite suggestions they may have been postponed due to Platini, one of the candidates, currently serving a ban from Fifa. 

An interesting story, which leads to another story, was a little addition at the end of Fifa's report on the ExCo meeting: "Due to the frequency and the high volume of qualifying matches for the 2018 FIFA World Cup (851)(no kidding, they've been underway since last spring!), the committee agreed to establish a specific bureau and an emergency bureau for the preliminary competition. The bureaus will be chaired by Sheik Salman Bin Ebrahim Al Khalifa."

Sheikh Salman Bin Ebrahim Al Khalifa has been a man in the news, if you follow the news about characters of suspicious backgrounds who seem to find their way into football. He has announced that he will stand for the Fifa presidency, and is seen as favourite now that Platini's bid has hit a bit of a bump, or a huge pothole. The Sheikh is currently the president of the Asian Football Confederation. And now for the bit which brought about this assessment by Nicholas McGeehan, the Gulf researcher at Human Rights Watch:
"If a member of Bahrain’s royal family is the cleanest pair of hands that Fifa can find, then the organisation would appear to have the shallowest and least ethical pool of talent in world sport." Mr. McGeehan, do you know Fifa? It sounds like a good case for the Ethics Committee's new powers then. (see link below for very interesting read about how the eithics committee was indeed asked to investigate Sheikh Salman, but this didn't happen)

Why the outrage? Sheik Salman Bin Ebrahim Al Khalifa, then president of the Bahrain Football Association, was alleged to be "involved in identifying athletes involved in pro-democracy demonstrations in 2011, some of whom were then allegedly imprisoned and tortured." Human Rights organisations have written to Issa Hayatou, acting president of Fifa, asking that the Sheikh is barred from the presedential elections.

This just keeps getting better and better. And again, I say, let it be a toss up between the former players: Zico, Vega, Nakhid and......Ginola?

 http://www.theguardian.com/football/2015/oct/16/sheikh-salman-al-khalifa-fifa-president-bahrain-human-rights