When Sepp Blatter needed a safe pair of hands for the delicate task of moving the Qatar 2022 World Cup to winter, the Fifa president knew just where to turn. The Bahraini president of the Asian Football Confederation, Sheikh Salman bin Ebrahim al-Khalifa was appointed to head up a taskforce that, in typical Fifa style, would work for months on end before reaching a preordained conclusion.
The softly spoken Bahraini royal is one of a number of increasingly influential figures from the region who have floated almost unnoticed to positions of prominence. Now Sheikh Salman is favourite to ascend to the top role in world football amid an unprecedented swirl of crisis.
He is drawing support from Europe, Asia, South America and Africa, so there is a strong chance he could become Fifa’s first Asian president in the election to replace the disgraced and deposed Blatter in February next year.
With the outgoing Blatter, his heir apparent and bitter rival Michel Platini and the secretary general, Jérôme Valcke, all suspended for 90 days while the Fifa ethics committee continues its investigations, Sheikh Salman has all of a sudden become the next cab off the rank.
The 49-year-old will go to Zurich on Monday for talks with the various confederation heads before announcing his candidacy and will no doubt be painted as the man who can wash away the stains of corruption that have enveloped Fifa’s opulent glass and chrome HQ.
His supporters will point to the fact that he has been Asian Football Confederation president only since 2013, at which point he also joined the Fifa executive committee. As such, they say, he is untainted by its culture of kleptocracy and entitlement.
When he secured the AFC presidency his speech offered plenty of clues as to what to expect from his Fifa campaign. “You need to be part of an open, fair transparent dialogue in the future,” he said. “Clean up the past and turn the page for the future, restore transparency and integrity.” They are words that fall effortlessly from the lips of Fifa officials but are seldom translated into action.
Looking on as Sheikh Salman secured 33 of the 46 available votes to ascend to one of the most powerful roles in world football were Platini and Blatter. Both had backed his candidacy, a fact that on its own is enough to undermine claims that he represents a fresh start. Four years earlier, Sheikh Salman had been narrowly beaten by Mohamed Bin Hammam in a tussle over Asia’s Fifa executive committee seat.
The campaign soon got out of hand, with Sheikh Salman’s backer Dr Chung Mong-joon (himself last week banned for six years by Fifa’s ethics committee) calling Bin Hammam “mentally ill” and the Qatari threatening to chop his head off in return. Allegations – denied by both sides – of intimidation, corruption and treachery abounded.
The AFC, which should be one of the game’s engines of growth, has been mired in chaos since Bin Hammam was cast from the Fifa kingdom for daring to take on Blatter for the presidency. Caught offering bribes via Jack Warner to Caribbean Football Union officials and later accused of operating a $5m slush fund from his AFC office to grease the wheels of global football politics, Bin Hammam exited the scene in 2011 amid a swirl of allegation and counter-allegation.
Two years of drift followed under the ineffectual Chinese Zhang Jilong before Platini and Blatter saw to it that their man won the day. But there was another powerbroker with a hand in his ascension to AFC president. Many believe Sheikh Salman to be a front for another royal from a nearby Gulf state.
His campaign had been backed by the political muscle of Sheikh Ahmad al-Fahad al-Sabah, the Kuwaiti who is increasingly powerful on the global sports circuit. With his omnipresent bodyguards and shoulder length curls, he has steadily built a powerbase in the Olympic world where, he is a key ally of Thomas Bach, the president of the International Olympic Committee. For two years, as the wheels have fallen off for Blatter following the FBI raids that blew the lid off decades of graft and corruption, he has been quietly doing the same in football. It was al-Sabah, a prominent supporter of Blatter before his downfall in May, who met with Platini at the Champions League final a week later to promise the backing of the region if he went for the presidency.
He and Sheikh Salman promised to swing the majority of the AFC behind the Frenchman, even though Prince Ali of Jordan from their own confederation was again standing. But with Platini’s candidacy dead in the water after he failed to supply a convincing explanation for why he received £1.35m from Blatter nine years after he stopped working for him, the Sheikhs began to consider a plan B. With Uefa also casting around for an alternative following the defenestration of their leader, the planets aligned for Sheikh Salman.
His biggest task is not likely to be securing the votes of enough of the 209 member associations to win but in convincing the wider world that he really does represent a new broom.
Having been head of his country’s FA since 2002 and present at a string of Fifa tournaments, he has been kicking around the lower rungs for a while.
He is not only closely aligned with both Blatter and Platini but also al-Sabah – the man who has called the media racist for questioning the Qatar 2022 World Cup and loudly backed Blatter even as events spun beyond his control in May.
And that is before he has to address questions about his country’s human rights record, and in particular any role in quashing the 2011 pro-democracy demonstrations that gripped the country in 2011, that were raised during his 2013 AFC presidency bid but will only return at louder volume now. He denies that he played any part.
Football’s insular leaders, fearful of their own positions as the Swiss prosecutor and the FBI continue their investigations, may already believe they have found their man. Convincing the wider world that installing a Sheikh from a feudal monarchy who owes his position to those now under suspicion represents progress will be a tougher job altogether.
