FIFA now has a new president who will play by new rules in the hope that world football's governing body can extricate itself from its huge corruption mess. Though two Arabs were running in the five-man race to succeed the disgraced Sepp Blatter, it was the Swiss Gianni Infantino who eventually won a second round of voting in Zurich on Friday, polling 115 votes from the available 207 delegates, 27 more than his closest rival and marginal favorite Sheikh Salman Al-Khalifa of Bahrain. Prince Ali of Jordan, who took Blatter to a second round of voting last year with a surprisingly high 73 votes, secured only four. Infantino, the UEFA's secretary-general, takes over at a time when FIFA is enduring its most difficult period in its 112-year history. Criminal investigations in the US and Switzerland have resulted in the indictment of dozens of football officials for corruption, many of them serving or former presidents of national or continental associations. The final crushing blow was the $200 million FIFAgate corruption investigation which saw the arrests and indictments of 41 individuals which started in May last year in the now infamous hotel swoop. Blatter was forced to stand down and was later suspended from football for six years for breaching ethics guidelines. His vice-president Michel Platini met a similar fate. To help Infantino tackle the crisis that has enveloped FIFA, key reforms were passed to help make it a more transparent and accountable organization. Those reforms, said to be just as important as the arrival of a new president, include limiting the organization's president to three four-year terms in office. This truncated term is crucial. Infantino became just the third head of FIFA since 1974, after Joao Havelange clung to power for 24 years and Blatter 17. A new 36-member council, increased from 24, will replace the executive committee. The council will also feature a female representative from each confederation. The new reforms will also mean that the salaries for the president, all council members and the secretary-general, will be disclosed. The package of sweeping reforms passed with 89 percent of the vote earlier on Friday renders the office of FIFA president much less powerful than it had been under Blatter who wielded immense power and set the tone, direction and agenda for the entire sport. Infantino will not have executive powers, unlike his predecessor. The council will no longer get to vote on World Cup hosts, a duty that will fall to the congress, made up of all 209 member nations. It is apparently much easier to bribe 24 individuals than 209. The council, unlike the executive committee, will no longer oversee business decisions which, along with the World Cup allocation, were rife with shady dealings. That will be handled by a new secretary-general and his administration, to be appointed and overseen by the council. The reforms now mostly reduce the new president to a figurehead while FIFA's powers have been decentralized and dispersed to a much larger group of people. It might not stamp out corruption entirely but it will go some way toward cleaning up FIFA's name. Though many European confederations and the US breathed a sigh of relief over Infantino's election, it did not go unnoticed that he is a football insider himself who has close links with Platini. It is now in Infantino's hands to try to persuade sponsors and the judicial authorities of both the US and Switzerland that he is on the right track to repair FIFA's reputation. The task ahead is enormous. Infantino has a little over three years, up until the next scheduled election in 2019, to repair FIFA's battered image and virtually nonexistent credibility.
