Jordan Prince Ali to run for FIFA presidency

LONDON. KAZINFORM - Prince Ali bin al-Hussein, a member of Jordan's ruling family, has chosen a moment when his rival for the Fifa presidency, the Uefa president Michel Platini, is most vulnerable, to formally submit his candidature for the election, which is still scheduled for February, The Guardian reports.

Platini's position as Europe's candidate will be discussed on Thursday at a Uefa executive committee meeting in his absence, following his suspension from all football activities for 90 days by Fifa's ethics committee, which is investigating the £1.35m payment he received from Fifa in 2011. The other previously declared candidate, the Korean Chung Mong-joon, whom Ali replaced as the Asian Football Confederation's representative vice-president on Fifa's executive committee in 2011, was banned by Fifa for six years last weekfor multiple breaches of the ethics code. With Chung out of the election and Platini's hopes potentially terminally damaged by the ethics committee investigation and the Swiss criminal proceedings into the payment authorised by Sepp Blatter, Ali has pitched himself as a clean-up candidate, while still being reassuringly a Fifa insider. In a letter announcing the formal submission of his candidature, sent to the presidents and secretary-generals of all 209 national football associations around the world affiliated to Fifa, Ali included the soothing assurance: "I am one of you, an FA President, and I know how hard you strive to define football." Promising to restore Fifa's reputation from the crisis over its leadership - Blatter and the secretary-general, Jérôme Valcke, are suspended and a succession of other senior figures have been banned, indicted or suspended for corruption allegations - Ali praised the national FA presidents whose votes he is seeking as honest and committed. "I have never lost sight of the fact that there are so many good and honest people within the global Fifa organisation," he wrote in his letter. "The dark cloud over Fifa's leadership should not cast its shadow on our Member Associations and the thousands of volunteers who work tirelessly to bring the joy football [sic] to young boys and girls, and millions of fans the world over. "The crisis at Fifa is a crisis of leadership. I believe in this organisation. Together we will make it great again." Prince Ali, son of the late King Hussein of Jordan, became president of the Jordanian Football Association in 1999, when he was 23. He was the sole challenger to Blatter in the election earlier this year, gaining 73 votes to Blatter's 133 before withdrawing from a second round of voting. Blatter then announced, following the arrests and indictments of Fifa officials on US corruption charges, that he will step down in February when another election is planned to be held. However an emergency Fifa executive committee meeting next week may consider whether the election should now be delayed. There are growing calls for an interim independent process to run and reform Fifa, but no momentum has yet built within Fifa, or football associations more widely, for that to happen.