The 68-year-old van Praag said the settlement was “negotiated by the UEFA hierarchy and ECA, not by me” but it was him who got ECA chairman Karl-Heinz Rummenigge to take the breakaway threat off the table.
Advertisement
“When I have seen there was so much support, it was much easier”. The answer he said, was right place, right time.
Leading UEFA will be a severe test of his skills as it seeks to overcome the shock of losing former president Michel Platini, implicated in FIFA’s corruption scandals, and facing challenges to its prized Champions League.
Before Ceferin beat UEFA vice-president Michael van Praag 42-13 in the secret ballot, Platini was given special dispensation by FIFA’s ethics judge to bid farewell to European soccer leaders. As momentum grew, he also soon gathered the support of numerous Scandinavian countries, plus Italy, Germany and Russian Federation.
“This is an insult on the intelligence of all the national associations and those who are voting”, Infantino said after the vote.
Ceferin is a lawyer who took over his father’s business and has spent the last five years sorting out the Slovenian FA’s finances so it could build a proper training centre.
“It will be the first thing to deal with”, said Ceferin, who succeeds Michel Platini following his resignation after being banned from all football activity past year. Initially, he plans to remain in Ljubljana, where his law firm is based, rather than moving to the smooth glass offices of Uefa on the shores of Lake Geneva.
Slovenian Ceferin said his organisation should show the clubs “we are the ones who are the governing body”.
“If you want to ask me if he supported me, I hope so”.
“I was never operating behind the scenes”.
But he must also remember he only has his impressive mandate for two and a half years, as he is completing the term started by his disgraced predecessor Michel Platini. All of which should make for an interesting dynamic.
“For millions of people around the world, football is … a flame”, Platini said.
Federation Internationale de Football Association also faced more controversy after its Council, headed by Infantino, gave itself the right to hire and fire members of FIFA’s independent watchdog committees, a move which critics said stripped them of their independence.
“What I know is that I’m a team player, a man of conviction, a passionate man and a man of his word”.
“I am not a showman, I have no ego issues and I am not a man of unrealistic promises”, Ceferin told delegates before the vote. While the Uefa members patted themselves on the back and politicked on the Athens riviera, inside their bubble there is still too little realisation of the low esteem in which they are held by the wider world.
Advertisement
Explaining his remarkable journey, Ceferin insisted he was his own man and that no-one “behind the scenes” had pushed him into it despite plenty of speculation from the cynics that he had friends in high places, that Russian Federation had led an eastern bloc drive to manoeuvre him into the post and that FIFA boss Gianni Infantino had lent his tacit support.
