FIFA to sweet-talk anti-reform states as deadline approaches to vote on new power blueprint for football in Australia
FRIDAY is looming as a crucial point in the bitter battle for control of Australian football, as FIFA tries to steer the warring parties to a final armistice.
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FRIDAY is looming as a crucial point in the bitter battle for control of Australian football, as FIFA tries to steer the warring parties to a final armistice.
A series of teleconferences will be held on Thursday as the world governing body seeks to placate concerns of a handful of state associations threatening to torpedo reforms supported by a broad coalition of states, A-League clubs and the players union.
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Under the FIFA-defined timeline to reform Football Federation Australia’s annual Congress, and widen its franchise, an extraordinary general meeting must be called by Friday to debate the blueprint put together by the Congress Review Working Group to spread power more widely around the game.
Otherwise it raises the prospect once more of FIFA stepping in to suspend Australia’s membership, more than two years after it first directed Football Federation Australia to widen the franchise in its Congress.
The blueprint gives the A-League clubs, the players union and the women’s game more votes, but has been fought against by FFA’s board which claims the plan would weaken the games grassroots and give too much power to the professional side.
FIFA officials are to speak directly with a number of key stakeholders in the next 48 hours including the four state associations who have indicated they will oppose the reforms put forward by the CRWG.
If three of those four vote against the plan at the EGM – likely to be on September 28 - it will fail, and FIFA will be forced to step in – possibly imposing a normalization committee of its own handpicked members to run the game, or simply suspending Australia’s membership.
Meanwhile FFA’s controversial ban on political and nationalist club names and insignias will be reviewed, after the threat of an Italian-based club in NSW to fight it in the courts.
The National Club Identity Policy has since 2014 blocked any clubs from nationalistic references in their names and badges, sparking claims from some of the country’s most historic clubs that the game’s multicultural identity was being forcibly homogenized.
Under the NCIP clubs are banned from references that include “ethnic, national, political, racial or religious connotations” – strictures policed so heavily that Victorian side Avondale were forced to cover over a small Italian flag on the back of their shirts for an FFA Cup tie against Marconi.
Northern NSW side Charlestown City Blues had announced plans to take the policy to court claiming an infringement of human rights, a stance backed by the Association of Australian Football Clubs.
Now the NCIP is to be reviewed by early next year, with expectations that ethnically based clubs will be given at least more leeway in celebrating their heritage.
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