High hopes and doubts for UEFA’s little known new leader

athens — Aleksander Ceferin started his first day in charge of UEFA on Thursday facing big decisions, high hopes and some doubts over how a little-known official from Slovenia could become president of the most powerful football confederation.

Ceferin, an accomplished lawyer with little record in football before he became head of the Slovenian federation in 2011, hammered UEFA vice president Michael van Praag of the Netherlands 42-13 in a vote Wednesday that many saw as a call for change.

Slovenia’s Prime Minister Miro Cerar called a press conference to hail a “great day” for the country of two million. Many in Van Praag’s homeland had suspicions however.

“It is remarkable that an unknown Slovenian could have won,” said the Algemeen Dagblad newspaper. “The Russian sports minister (Vitaly Mutko) undoubtedly put pressure on many countries to allow him to win.”

Germany’s ARD television channel said that Ceferin gave a “cold, calculating” speech to the UEFA congress in Athens.

“The message: we do not speak about corruption, old boy networks or prosecutors’ investigations. It was the kind of speech that the high officials of football like to hear.” But at his first press conference, Ceferin, an athletic 48-yearold who has crossed the Sahara five times in cars and on a motor bike, brushed aside reports of behindthe-scenes backers and deals as “simple lies”.

Ceferin was publicly backed by football powers such as Italy, France and Germany as well as Russia. German federation president Reinhard Grindel said the vote showed a “fundamentally new dynamic” in European football and his country wants a say in Ceferin’s policies. Ceferin’s message to the UEFA congress was that he would be “bold and brave” to improve transparency and confront problems such as match-fixing, racism and stadium security.

But he also said UEFA’s 55 members are “tired” of the years of scandal that have tainted world body Fifa and which claimed the last European president Michel Platini over a $2 million payment from the world body. —