Chung Mong-joon, one of the most influential figures in Asian football, has ridiculed Sepp Blatter after announcing that he will enter the race to replace the Swiss as president of Fifa.
A former Fifa vice-president, the South Korean Chung described Blatter as “like a cannibal eating his parents and then crying like he’s an orphan” for trying to avoid responsibility for the crisis that has engulfed Fifa over the last few months. “He tries to blame everybody except himself,” Chung added.
Chung will make his formal announcement regarding his bid to be the Fifa President next month in Europe, “the centre of world football”. He said he wanted to be part of the solution to clean up the corruption-tainted governing body.
“I am going to stand as a candidate for the Fifa presidency,” he said, acknowledging he had a tough fight ahead of him. “It’s not easy but people don’t want to be part of corruption. They want to be part of the solution. We cannot leave Fifa in this kind of disgrace.”
Chung said he did not yet have the required backing of five Fifa federations that would allow him to stand but he was confident of getting that required support.
“I hope to have more than five nominations,” he said, adding he had received assurances of support from within Concacaf on a recent trip to the United States.
“If I get elected,” he told the BBC, “my job is not to enjoy the luxury of the office. My job is to change it … it is time that Fifa had a non-European leadership. Fifa became a closed organisation for President Blatter, his associates and his cronies and I want to change that.”
On Wednesday, Michel Platini announced he will also run to replace Blatter as the Fifa president in next February’s election but Chung believes that Platini is not the man to bring about the change needed. “Mr Platini enjoys institutional support from the current structure of Fifa. Mr Platini is very much a product of the current system.”
The FA has said that it will offer its backing to the Frenchman but added that Fifa must be “fundamentally changed” in the aftermath of the recent corruption scandal that has rocked football’s world governing body.
Meanwhile, Sheikh Salman bin Ebrahim al-Khalifa, the president of the Asian Football Confederation, has called for the region to unify behind one candidate in the presidential election and stopped short of endorsing Platini for the job.
“We have of course noted Michel Platini’s decision to stand,” Khalifa said in a statement released before Chung announced his candidacy. “He is certainly a unique candidate who would bring stability and a smooth transition to normality for Fifa in this difficult situation.”
“Yet we should also remember that the Fifa president is only one part of Fifa, which is why it is so important to get the reforms right as well. Everybody accepts the need for change in Fifa, and in addition to changing the president much of the rest of Fifa’s organisation and the way it functions need to be modernised as well. Fifa also needs someone who can take the best of the past, fuse it with new ideas, and so take the organisation into the future.”
The Jordanian Prince Ali bin al-Hussein, who lost to Blatter in the first round of last May’s presidential ballot before withdrawing, said on Wednesday that Platini’s candidature would not be good for Fifa.
Prince Ali, who is yet to announce whether he intends to run again, said the world governing body needed new, independent leadership “untainted by the practices of the past” in order for proper reform to take place.
The AFC statement echoed his call for a “new Fifa and a new Fifa president”, even if the fact that Prince Ali did not have the backing of his home confederation when he took on Blatter last year indicates that Asia is unlikely to vote as a bloc.
“Fifa is in a very difficult position right now. In order to stabilise it needs leadership, experience and new ideas, but above all it needs football to be placed at its heart,” Khalifa added. “Hopefully a new president can bring many of these things, which is why it is so important for Asia to remain as united as possible behind the single best candidate for football, regardless of where they are from.”