Prince Ali ‘pretty sure’ he will be next Fifa president

Prince Ali bin al-Hussein is, as one of his media team points out, the bookies’ favourite to succeed Sepp Blatter as Fifa president and they, it is always said around sport, are rarely wrong. Really, though, what could the number crunchers at Paddy Power or anywhere else possibly know about calling an election at an organisation that has not had a meaningful one in at least a couple of generations.

Still, at a federation whose sure things have tended to be that little bit surer, it is easy to see the perceived value in being the frontrunner. Prince Ali, after all, had a taste last year of being “the field” in a presidential race and so, for all the talk of wanting to transform Fifa over the coming few years, he can be forgiven if his campaign would like to see their man benefit from being seen as the man to back.

The 40-year-old Jordanian is not, he insists, “a politician” but his schedule – 17 countries over the next 20 days – suggests otherwise. The last few days have been relatively quiet; two days in London to meet with the English FA then the other “home” associations after their scheduled International Football Association Board meeting on Thursday. Yesterday it was Dublin and the FAI, or rather John Delaney.

The meeting, he says, went very well with the two men apparently sharing a great many views on how Fifa needs to be reformed. The “politician” claim, needless to say, rings a little bit hollow when he responds to a question about the €5 million Fifa paid the FAI, ostensibly on the basis of a poor piece of refereeing(“I didn’t get a chance to ask John about that today”), as it does again later when he says he would prefer not “to speculate” on whether he would have voted for Qatar to get the 2022 World Cup. The slightly exasperated laughter that accompanies each response at least suggests he is rather less hard-nosed when it comes to playing the game than the man he hopes to replace.

His message, of course, is all about change. At a time, however, when many are calling for not a trace of the old Fifa to be left behind, the four years he has served on the organisation’s executive committee (ExCo) do not seem like something he would be bolding up on his CV. Those years were a learning experience, he says.

“It wasn’t until I actually got into that room [the infamous ExCo meeting room at Fifa headquarters in Zurich], which is more like a bunker, three stories underground, that I came to understand what was going in the organisation,” he insists.

“There was a drip-feed system within Fifa and occasionally you could see somebody being rewarded or punished on the basis of something that really had nothing to do with football. For me that was completely unfair; very poor practice. It was something that had to change.

Continue that mission

“I came to a point where I said: ‘Okay, I either remain within the executive committee . . . ’ – but I could not do that in the circumstances – ‘or do the ultimate thing which is to run for the presidency,’ and at the end of the day that is the only way that you can change things [by running against Blatter last May]. I just want to continue that mission now but it is solely for the good of the game; nothing else.”

He has his critics. When Prince Ali ran for election for the Asian confederation’s vice presidency of the world body, his campaign included a promotional video that seemed to trade heavily on the closeness of his relationship with Blatter and there are those who believe that he should have been more outspoken about what he encountered in the four years he sat at the game’s top table.

In his defence, he says that he was not aware of what had happened before his election nor the criminality that prevailed amongst some of those he would have encountered. Rather, he says, “I could sense from the way things were conducted and from the culture within the organisation itself that things were not based, necessarily, on the best interests of football . . . and I’m not talking solely about Blatter.

“Putting any of the criminal things aside, what people might think was acceptable maybe 20 or 30 years ago is not acceptable now. You’re beholden to the people you serve. You cannot have even things like contracts being done without an open bid. That’s why I said that this culture has to change.”

He wants, he says, to embrace all of the major reforms that have been recommended. And then go further. He is accused by some of vagueness (he denies this) at a time that substantial detail is required, but he is committed to limits of two terms for the president and all ExCo members, as well as far greater financial transparency.

More broadly, he says he wants to “reverse the pyramid”; transforming Fifa into an organisation that supports its 209 member national associations rather than one that sets out simply to govern them. Having been president of Jordan’s association, he has experience in this area.

He believes that more can be done to financially back development programmes around the world but says that it is difficult to provide specifics on this when even he is unsure of the current financial situation within Fifa. “I will publish all of the finances and I will bring in a good team to manage the finances properly. But when you don’t know what’s going on . . .”

His schedule, a seemingly endless tour of national associations along with his repeated emphasis of their importance suggests an understandable desire to bypass the continental confederations, none of which has declared for him, and reach out to a new generation of administrators.

Uefa, he says however, “is a real model . . . in terms of staffing and governance. What I want to do is to raise the rest of the world up to the same standard. I think that they would be happy with that as well.”

Candidate

That might be just a little bit easier to say in the week that Michel Platini withdrew from the race. He declines to comment on the Frenchman directly, or on the suggestion that his Asian rival Salman Al Khalifa and Uefa’s general secretary, Gianni Infantino, who is also a candidate, may yet strike a deal to carve the top two jobs up between them.

He does say that Platini has done a “good job” at Uefa while “that whole culture of making deals, if it is the case, is not acceptable anymore”.

If he really believes the latter, then Fifa will surely have to have changed a good deal already for him to stand any chance. Yet he insists that if the election is fair, as he says he believes it will be, then he is “pretty sure,” he will win.

He certainly sounds sincere and, for a man of his background (his father was King Hussein), remarkably grounded. In May, he lost very well, with great dignity, even humility and yet, what do we know? Privately, he might already be mulling over who will play him in the second Fifa movie (to be titled: ‘Redemption’ no doubt).

Like the bookies, all we can say for sure is that he talks a good game. Whether it is good enough or, perhaps more pertinently, the game the electorate wants to hear, will only become clear in Zurich on February 26th.