FIFA President Sepp Blatter has called on Germany's World Cup winner Franz Beckenbauer and his panel of soccer experts to try to come up with an alternative to penalty shootouts to settle drawn matches. Blatter was speaking to delegates at the FIFA Congress Friday less than a week after Chelsea beat Bayern Munich on penalties to win the Champions League final. “Football can be a tragedy when you go to penalty kicks. Football is a team game, when it goes to one against one football loses its essence,” Blatter said. “Perhaps Franz Beckenbauer, with his Football 2014 group, can show us a solution, perhaps not today but in the future.” Beckenbauer, who won the World Cup with Germany as both a player and manager was among the delegates at the congress, was not immediately available for comment but his views are well known on the matter. The German has said he would rather have penalties than either a golden or silver goal which were used briefly to determine matches. Blatter has been calling for reforms to the game for a while and this is not the first time he has said he wanted to see penalty shootouts replaced. But the fact he made the comment in his speech to delegates underlines his desire for the Football Committee to take some action on the issue. Dozens of high profile finals, including the 1994 and 2006 World Cup finals, European Championships and Champions League finals have all been decided on penalties since they were introduced in their modern format in 1970. FIFA congress adopts first wave of reforms FIFA Friday adopted a first wave of statutory reforms centered on ethics, as well as the creation of its first executive committee post for women's football, to combat claims of corruption and double-dealing. Delegates at the annual congress in Budapest voted to strengthen the role of the audit and compliance commission, which from now on will not just deal with financial issues but also adherence to rules and regulations. The head of the commission will be the Swiss-Italian Domenico Scala until the next gathering when an election will be held. Congress members also voted in favor of creating separate investigation and adjudication offices at the heart of the ethics commission. Appointments to the posts will take place at the end of June. Blatter described the developments as “historic” and said they were an important step forward for football's world governing body, after a series of corruption scandals tainted the organisation's image. But Blatter warned: “We can't do everything at once. It's impossible. We can only cherry-pick.” The reforms were proposed after allegations of graft and conflict of interest last year, notably claims of bribery for the awarding of the 2022 World Cup to Qatar. Lydia Nsekera, president of the Burundi Football Association, was co-opted on to the executive committee Tuesday and took her seat Friday. She will stay in the post until 2013, when elections will be held. World football nations should not waste “a brilliant opportunity” to clean up the governing body after years of turmoil, FIFA's top anti-corruption adviser Mark Pieth warned Friday. Pieth urged FIFA to help prevent financial abuses and other wrongdoings within the organization by creating a whistleblowers' hotline that would allow fans and players report corruption suspicions and breaches of conflict of interest rules. It should also conduct integrity checks on senior officials and make their salaries public as part of reform efforts. “Do something really courageous and generations of footballers, fans and stakeholders will remember you for it,” Pieth told delegates from 208 member countries. The governing body approved a limited slate of changes during the meeting.
