Malta hosts UEFA supporters of Platini’s FIFA bid

Malta will be hosting a meeting of some of European football’s national presidents to hear details of Michel Platini’s manifesto for FIFA takeover.

The September 15-16 meeting will be attended by UEFA members who mostly supported Jordanian royal Prince Ali bin al-Hussein in his leadership bid against FIFA president Sepp Blatter. 

The meeting is one of few scheduled meetings where large numbers of FIFA voters will gather before the election congress in Zurich.

Malta Football Association president Norman Darmanin Demajo was a supporter of Prince Ali’s leadership bid.

On Monday, Prince Ali said FIFA – football’s international governing body – cannot make credible changes in the last months of Blatter’s leadership of the scandal-hit body.

He also doubted the worth of FIFA’s in-house reforms task force, which is supported by Platini, his former ally and now frontrunner to succeed Blatter in an election to be held on 26 February, 2016.

“I don’t think anybody will take any decisions that are credible in the current situation,” Prince Ali told the Associated Press in a telephone interview Monday.

“I think that the important thing is that you need an overall change in leadership,” said the prince, who described Platini as “not good for FIFA” when the UEFA president launched his campaign two weeks ago. “The entire football world would like to see a change.”

Prince Ali has not committed to making a second bid to be president and enact that change. “Right now I’m talking to our national associations, listening to their opinions,” said the prince, who got votes from 73 of FIFA’s 209 member federations when Blatter won re-election in May.

But Blatter announced he would leave office under pressure from dual American and Swiss federal investigations of corruption that finally drove World Cup sponsors to demand a change of culture at FIFA.

Prince Ali could outline campaign plans in September as a keynote speaker at the Soccerex conference in Manchester, England.  “It’s a place where I will obviously want to present my ideas for what I think is best for the organization,” said the prince, who served as Asia’s FIFA vice president for four years until May.